‘I wonder if you could actually kill anyone with this,’ Kim said. ‘Mrs Jackson, maybe.’
All three girls looked at the way the bent sword flopped back and forth and once again they were laughing. The moment was cut short by the snap and creak of the dressing-room door opening, a round, bespectacled face peering inside.
‘Did I hear my name?’ Mrs Jackson asked. ‘Do you need me, girls?’
‘It’s okay, miss,’ said Kim, jabbing the sword in the teacher’s direction and breathing die die die in between her words. ‘We were just practising our lines.’
‘Good good,’ Mrs Jackson said. ‘Well, hurry up and get ready. Dress rehearsal starts in –’ she checked her watch for what felt like an eternity, ‘seven minutes.’
She hung on for a second more, as if waiting to be dismissed, then ducked back out of the dressing room.
‘I can’t be bothered with this,’ said Daisy, feeling an unwelcome pressure in her chest. She knew it wasn’t that she couldn’t be bothered. It was nerves. She felt them every time they took to the stage, but it was definitely getting worse. Heaven only knew what she’d be like on the actual night. ‘Does someone want to take my place?’
‘And fake-snog Freddy? No way!’ said Chloe. ‘I’d rather kiss Mrs Jackson.’
‘Liar,’ said Daisy with a smile. She’d finally managed to pull on her other glove, straightening out the silk around the crook of her elbow. ‘Ready?’
She turned from the mirror to Kim. Her friend was still waving her sword back and forth, harder now, faster. It was difficult to tell with the glare of the bulbs behind her, but she seemed to be staring right back at Daisy, her eyes impossibly dark. And each time the tinfoil-coated blade swooshed through the quiet air her mouth breathed that same whispered word.
Die. Die. Die. Die. Die. Die. Die.
‘Um . . . Kim?’ Daisy said. Kim cut back and forth once more, then seemed to stir, as if emerging from a hypnotic trance. She blinked heavily a couple of times.
‘Huh?’ she said after a second or two.
‘Nothing,’ said Daisy, walking towards the door. ‘Come on, let’s get this over and done with.’
Brick
Fursville Amusement Park, Hemmingway, Norfolk, 3.03 p.m.
Brick Thomas hated everybody.
He hated his dad, he hated his stepmum, he hated his real mum too for dying when he was a ginger-haired sprat in nursery school; he hated his brother, who’d left home two years back to join the parachute regiment; he really hated his teachers, who had told him not to even bother turning up for his A levels, and he really, really hated the school counsellor who’d informed his dad he had behavioural difficulties; he hated his friends, if you could even call them that when they didn’t bother talking to him any more; and if he was totally honest there were times when he hated his girlfriend – although he wasn’t sure about this one because sometimes love and hate felt so similar he couldn’t tell the difference between them.
He hated himself, too, his brain, the way it made him feel perfectly happy one minute then as miserable as a graveyard the next. He hated it for whispering things to him – You’re no good. You can’t do that. You’re too thick. No one likes you because you’re a headcase – not all the time or anything, but often enough for him to feel like there was something living up there, something that detested him. Most of all, though, he just hated the hate. It was exhausting.
He sat on the raised concrete footpath that looked down over the beach, idly tossing stones at the calm, quiet surf. The tide was out, but even so there was only about twenty metres of shore between the water and the massive dune behind him. On the other side of that lay Fursville, a vast shipwreck of shorn metal and rotting wood and rubbish and rat-droppings that had once been Norfolk’s biggest and most popular theme park.
Back when Brick was a kid he’d come here all the time with his folks, patiently enduring the slow, boring drive through the country lanes from Norwich because the destination was well worth it. There had been a roller coaster, one of the old wooden ones, no loop the loop or anything but still pretty fast. Loads of arcades too, so many that their garbled, artificial birdsong was ingrained in his head, the clarion call of summer. They’d stretched all the way up from the plaza to a pier that had caught fire in 1999, on the eve of a massive Millennium celebration, and which was now a broken, skeletal limb all but buried by sand and surf.
His favourite thing about Fursville, though, had been the water flume, because you had to squeeze into this tiny little longboat which was ratcheted up Everest-high slopes before being slingshotted through freezing puddles of piss-yellow water. He’d liked it because it was the only time he’d ever got a hug from his dad. The old man didn’t have a choice in the matter – you had to grab hold of the person in front of you or risk flying out of the boat on the downward bends. He’d loved that feeling of being held in place, the weight of those tattooed arms on his shoulders, like his dad and gravity were one and the same, stopping him from bouncing right off the planet into the cold, infinite darkness of space.
Not that he ever would have admitted to those feelings, even if he’d been able to put them into any kind of words back then. If nothing else, his pop would have thumped him. He was eighteen now, though, and he didn’t care what his dad thought.
He glanced at the sky, a vast expanse of pale blue, the sun so bright that it made his retinas sting. There was no sound but the whisper of the knee-high waves as they cruised onto the stones, that and the distant chatter of gulls from Hemsby a mile or so south. A decade ago he’d loved it here because there were so many people, their constant motion and sound the exact opposite of the cold vacuum at home that his mum had once filled so effortlessly. Now he appreciated it precisely because of the quiet, the stillness. Here, in the mangled guts of Fursville, there was nobody to hate.
Brick’s backside was getting numb and he stood up, lobbing a last fist-sized rock into the sea. His phone informed him it had just gone three. Lisa would be leaving school any second now and he’d told her he’d be waiting by the gates. Fat chance, it would take him half an hour or so to get back into the city and by that time he expected she’d be home, sending the first of a seemingly limitless supply of angry texts.
He groaned, feeling the delicate equilibrium of his mood start to slide. He’d begun to feel like a tightrope walker, trying to keep his footing by using one of those long poles. Sometimes, when things were okay, his mood could balance perfectly on that thread. But it didn’t take much to make it wobble. Anything could do it – somebody speaking out of turn to him, some aggro from his teachers, even a strange look. But he’d learned to deal with the wobbles: he just took a deep breath and let his mood stabilise again.
The problem was when more than one thing went wrong. The first would nudge his emotions like a breeze, perfectly manageable with a small adjustment, but the second would be like a crazed seagull full in the face, flapping and squawking, and suddenly his mood would drop like a ton of bricks and the world would go dark.
He closed his eyes, the spotlight sun leaving the faintest flutter of pain against his skull. One breath, then out, another, slowly, deeply, and when he opened his eyes again he felt calmer, his mood perfectly balanced.
He walked down the path, the back of his neck stinging where the sun had caught it. He tanned about as well as an albino vampire, his freckled skin veering wildly between extremes of milk white and tomato red throughout the year. His hair colour was to blame, about as bright a shade of orange as you could imagine.
A dozen metres from where he had been sitting was one of the many breaches in the Fursville fence. Most had been caused by nothing more than neglect, the metal simply rusting into oblivion. This one, though, he’d made himself about three years ago when he and a couple of mates had first explored the abandoned theme park. They’d brought a pair of wire cutters and a torch and a rucksack, and they’d spent the night looking for treasures – old soft toys and canned sweets from the crumbling g
ames stands, cash out of the machines in the toilets, bottles left over from the bar where the adults had sheltered while their kids tore from attraction to attraction like banshees.
In the end they’d not found much apart from a couple of tubs of mouldy looking boiled sweets and a stack of plastic-wrapped urinal-disinfectant blocks which Brick’s friend Douglas Frinton had claimed they could use to make their own vodka. But they’d had a hell of a night exploring the place. Although the outside areas of Fursville were derelict and dangerous, the inside – once you got past the chains and the locked doors – was in pretty decent shape. Brick had even spent the night there once after a massive dust-up with his dad, sleeping in the old restaurant, curled up under a couple of tablecloths that had been left behind.
He pushed his way in through the hole, making sure to tuck the fence back behind him and cover it with a massive square of plyboard. Not that he really needed to. Nobody ever came out this way any more, there were no lights on the walkway or in the park, and, like all places that had been abandoned, Fursville had its fair share of rumours about murderers and ghosts. He had visited enough times to know that none of those stories were true. Out here, there was only Brick.
It was always like running an assault course, getting from the beach into the central plaza, but he negotiated the rubble, the broken glass and the faded grins of the kids’ mini roundabout characters with practised ease. His 50cc motorbike was where he’d left it, propped up against a fountain that was overflowing with algae, the front L-plate hanging at an angle where one of the magnetic catches had dropped off. He’d been riding it illegally for a year now and had no intention of ever going for his test. Not until he was rich enough for a Ducati, anyway.
He pulled the helmet on. It pinned his ears back uncomfortably but he didn’t really mind. At least it hid his hair. Then he clambered on board, the bike far too small for his six-foot-five frame. It took six kicks before the lawnmower-size motor decided to wake up, the bike accelerating painfully slowly across the plaza. He ignored the signs for the exit – the front gates were boarded up and chain-bound, Alcatraz-style. Instead he cut towards the south-west quadrant of the park, the engine whining like a bloated fly. He followed his own burned tyre tracks round the corner and down past the medical shack – the words ‘Boo Boo Station’ just about still visible on the pebble-dashed wall. Right ahead was a gap in the fence, just the right size for his bike. He slowed as he squeezed through, gunning the engine to make sure it didn’t stall, then edged between the two enormous laurel bushes that grew up right outside it.
He instinctively looked left and right, not wanting to give away his secret hideout. But there was no danger of anybody seeing him. The wide road beyond was deserted. On the other side of it was a car lot and showroom that had been forsaken for almost as long as the funfair. Past the empty expanse of concrete and dirt Brick could make out the smoking chimneys and blinking lights of the fertiliser factory which lay half a mile inland. That was the closest anyone really came to Fursville nowadays.
He paused for a minute, enjoying the stillness, the way time seemed to stop here. Even with the nasal whine of his bike it seemed quieter and more peaceful than back in the city. But Lisa was waiting, and the sad fact of it was that she was scary enough even when she wasn’t screaming at him.
Sighing, Brick gunned the engine and took off for home.
Norwich, 3.57 p.m.
‘So . . . It’s Brick, right?’
Brick nodded, trying not to smile at the sight of Lisa’s mum and dad staring out at him from the safety of their front porch. Mr Dawlish, who was in his early fifties but who looked twice that, was gripping the door with both hands as if he thought he might have to slam it shut at a moment’s warning. His wife, who had all Lisa’s bad qualities and none of her good ones, was on tiptoes peeking over his shoulder. Both weren’t so much smiling as grimacing. He was used to it. Standing six five, and broad with it, people were naturally wary of him. And he had one of those faces, so he’d been told, whatever that meant. It was just his lot. Everybody hated Brick Thomas.
‘She knows you’re here,’ said Mr Dawlish. ‘I think she’s coming down.’
He looked back at his wife and she shrugged.
‘I think she is.’ Mrs Dawlish peered at the helmet clasped in Brick’s hands. ‘I hope you’re not planning to take her anywhere on that?’
‘No, Mrs Dawlish,’ Brick lied. Lisa always rode pillion. It wasn’t like anything bad could happen to her – the bike’s top speed was just shy of forty when there were two people on it. Despite his answer, Mrs Dawlish frowned. She opened her mouth to say something then obviously decided not to.
‘Why Brick?’ Mr Dawlish asked after an uncomfortable silence. ‘I take it that isn’t your given name.’
‘Just another brick in the Thomas family wall, I guess,’ Brick said. ‘Like the song. My mum and dad have always called me it. It says John on my birth certificate.’ That was a lie too, his real name was Harry, but he liked to see the look on people’s faces when they thought his name was John Thomas. It took Mr Dawlish a second or two to get the joke, and when he did his forehead creased like an accordion. There were another few strokes of awkwardness before Brick heard footsteps from inside the house. Her parents both turned as Lisa appeared.
‘Four o’clock?’ she said, tapping the bare patch on her arm where a watch might have been. She was pretty, there was no doubt about that, but she did a good job of hiding it behind too much make-up and hair that was constantly straightened and dyed before being scraped back into a ponytail. She had a stud in her nose and a ring in her eyebrow – both of which her parents had blamed Brick for, even though he hated piercings. She looked at him now from behind false lashes that had been badly fixed.
‘Sorry,’ Brick said. ‘I got caught up at work; there was a late delivery.’
‘Trouble on site?’ Mr Dawlish asked. Brick had told Lisa that he worked for the same scaffolding company as his dad. Which was true, strictly speaking, although he hadn’t helped out for weeks now.
‘Nothing we couldn’t handle,’ Brick replied. ‘You just can’t get the staff these days.’
For some reason that seemed to relax the old couple. Mr Dawlish nodded, a glimmer of a smile appearing in the folds of his face.
‘You’re not wrong there, son.’ He turned to his daughter. ‘Come on, love, are you going or not? You’re letting all this heat in.’
Lisa locked eyes with Brick for a good seven seconds, then uttered a mini scream of frustration, barging past her parents and out the door.
‘You better make this up to me, Brick,’ she muttered, that expression demolishing the foot of height difference between them and making him feel like the smaller of the two. Out in the sunlight he noticed that she looked different, somehow, although he couldn’t quite put a finger on why. Nothing so trivial as a new type of foundation or T-shirt. No, it was something in her eyes, in the way she looked at him. For some reason it made his skin crawl. She must have been really angry.
‘Easy, tiger,’ he said, holding his arms up in surrender. ‘I will, I promise.’
‘Have fun,’ Mr Dawlish said as they walked down the path. Brick waved, hearing Mrs Dawlish’s shrill cry follow them all the way to the gate.
‘Be back by ten, please. And don’t you go anywhere on that bike!’
He smiled, but it was short lived. He glanced at Lisa again, trying to work out what was making him so uneasy and wishing that he’d stayed on the beach.
Daisy
Boxwood St Mary, 6.22 p.m.
‘Um, ’tis he, that villain Romeo,’ said Kim without enthusiasm, still thrusting her sword but this time at Fred.
‘More venom, dear,’ said Mrs Jackson from the wings, interrupting the same way she had done with pretty much every single line so far. ‘You hate his guts.’
‘I hate your guts, you old bag,’ muttered Kim, the acoustics of the school hall carrying her voice further than she had intended. Daisy would have
laughed except she was exhausted. They’d been here for three hours and they were still on Act I. At this rate they wouldn’t be home till the weekend, even though they were only doing a cut-down version of the play.
‘’Tis he,’ Kim spat, swiping her weapon, giving all the venom she could manage. ‘That villain, Romeo!’
‘Content thee, gentle cuz, leave him alone,’ said Ethan, the fat kid from Daisy’s year who was playing her dad. He was wearing a toga, and he’d drawn a goatee on himself with eyeliner which made him look ridiculous. ‘I would not for all the wealth of all the . . . town, um, here in my house do him . . .’
‘Disparagement, Ethan,’ said Mrs Jackson without needing to look at the script in her hand.
‘Yeah, disparagement. So be patient, take no note of him, it is my will.’
‘It fits, when such a villain is a guest,’ Kim went on. ‘I’ll not endure him.’
‘You’ll make a mutiny amongst my guests!’ roared Ethan, shaking his fists. ‘You will set cock-a-hoop!’
Everybody giggled – they always did at that line – the sound both echoed and muted by the huge, empty hall. Mrs Jackson shushed them.
‘Romeo?’ said Mrs Jackson. ‘Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?’
‘Huh?’ Fred said, obviously perplexed. He stood on the other side of a large canteen table, and he must have sensed Daisy looking because he glanced up, catching her eye. She twisted her head away so hard that something twanged in the back of her neck, her cheeks flaring once more beneath her make-up.
The Fury Page 3
