by David Park
The voices have dropped lower until he’s not sure if they’re there at all and sometimes he thinks the whispers he hears come from inside his head. Someone must have seen him, or maybe they were watching the house all the time. If he has to, he will take them with him and not give it a second thought because it’s time for someone to pay and if they get in the way of what he has to do then it makes no odds. But nothing happens and although pain is stirring in his arms and legs from the strain of his position, he knows he can’t move without making noise and giving confirmation of his presence. He tries to tells himself that maybe it’s just a bunch of kids who’re taking advantage of an empty house to turn it over, thieving everything they can carry away, so if he waits a little longer he’ll be able to make a getaway. But as he shifts his weight and raises his face in search of fresher air, he hears the shout of excited voices and names called to each other. Perhaps they’ve been waiting for reinforcements or the arrival of guns, or for someone who will tell them what to do.
‘Why don’t you come out now, Marty?’ a voice suddenly calls. It’s loud and clear and must come from someone standing on the landing. He doesn’t recognise the voice. ‘Why don’t you come out and we can talk about this man to man?’ He doesn’t answer but tightens his grip on the gun. ‘We haven’t got all night, Marty and patience is runnin’ out. So why not stop skulking up there like a rat in a pipe, give us back what doesn’t belong to you and we’ll call it quits?’ He still doesn’t answer. ‘Marty, speak to me – we’re reasonable people, we understand you’re not thinkin’ straight but this isn’t gonna help anybody, especially not you.’ He kneels on the rafters and points the gun at the entrance which he expects to see flipped open at any moment. ‘This is your last chance, Marty, no shit Marty, this is your last chance, for some of the team aren’t as reasonable as me. Know what I mean, mucker?’ For all their talk he knows that none of them is keen to be the first to thrust his head through the entrance, that they have already understood the vulnerability of that position, how exposed they would be in the moments it would take to hoist themselves up into darkness, a movement that would require both their hands.
‘Okay Marty, have it your way,’ the voice calls and his words are followed by silence again. He stands up and moves towards the water tank, driven by a fear that they might shoot up through the ceilings, maybe pepper them with a shotgun. His right leg is numb but he squeezes into the gap between the tank and the outside wall. No shots come, just a new whispering rush of voices and sounds he doesn’t recognise which filter up in distorted waves. He strains to listen but can’t make any sense of the activity below until finally he hears it and understands. There is the raking, breaking surge of a fire taking hold and a snarling crackle as it starts to consume the dried-up kindling of the house below. He knows now that they’ve sprinkled petrol, thrown in a match, intend him to burn in it. The first slow puffs of smoke are already beginning to seep into the roof space and he doesn’t want it to end like this. He hasn’t finished what he has to do and he won’t be cheated of it like this. There is little time left for him, he has to get out, so he goes to the door and feels its first flush of heat. He slides it no more than a inch and that’s enough to see that the very heart of the fire is on the landing below and the crazy, convulsive fury of flame will soon reach ceiling height, so he drops it back in place and retreats, his face wearing a tight print of heat. He shines the torch round, lets it slide across the roof, thinks of forcing his way out through the tiles but despite the furious press and batter of his hands they remain securely in place. The angle is wrong and standing on the rafters restricts his movements. The smell and taste of the smoke is in his throat now – he knows the door will go on fire soon and when that happens a surge of flame and smoke will shoot through the funnel of the opening.
He scampers across the rafters to the wall that joins the house to the next in the row, shining the light on the red partition of brick. The mortar is smeared thinly and flakes away at the skim of the torch. The terrace row of houses is over a hundred years old, built to house the army of shipyard workers, and he knows now that it’s his only chance, so he steadies himself, finding a balance by holding on to the trusses above his head, and kicks the wall again and again, concentrating on the same spot where the bricks run down to an edge, until it suddenly gives way in a dust-filled collapse. He shines the torch through into the next roof space to see the mirror image of where he stands and then with his hands pushes enough bricks out of the wall for him to scramble through. But he doesn’t follow his first impulse and go to the entrance, instead moves to the adjoining wall and repeats his actions until he’s broken his way into the third house. It’s here that he removes the door to the roof space and drops down to the landing. There is a scurry of a rat at his feet at which he kicks out, but it vanishes into the thick shadows of one of the rooms. Making his way down the stairs without the use of the torch, his eyes by now attuned to the darkness, he stumbles his way through to the kitchen. His foot scrunches something metal. The door and windows are boarded up and he has no choice but to switch on the torch to search for an opening, and as he does so the light catches the litter of beer cans and polythene bags. It’s somewhere kids have been using to drink and sniff glue. The walls are paint-sprayed with their names and everywhere there is the acrid smell of piss. As soon as he puts his hand to the back door it flops open like a turned page in a book and when he steps into the yard he gulps deeply, trying to expel the taste of the smoke.
He’s still too close to his house so he climbs the wall into the next yard and on and on until he reaches the end house of the derelict row. Only there does he look back to see yellow spurts of flame vaulting from the upper windows and a black spiral of smoke beginning to coil up from the roof. In a short time the whole house will be engulfed and for a few moments he feels transfixed by the sight, wants to stay and watch it to the very end. A smile spreads across his face. There is a snap and the crash of something collapsing in on itself and the sound seems to shake him free, so he opens the door to the entry quietly and peers back down its length but it’s empty, and hugging the darkness coating the walls, he hurries away and back to where his car is parked.
The gospel hall is lit up now and as he gets into the car he can hear hymn-singing. His mother came here from time to time, once tried to get them as boys to go to the Sunday school but they miched off, spent the collection money on sweets. There were times like that when they were cruel to her, doing what they wanted, secure in the knowledge that she would never tell him and so they exploited her silence. He checks his rear-view mirror to make sure he’s not being followed and drives off, and for a little while before the car’s engine and the tight grid of roads impose themselves, he carries the memory of that chorus of voices and wonders what his mother’s voice sounded like when she sang.
*
She stands at the stern of the boat and watches the tumbling plume of water weave itself into a foaming, briny braid. The fine, salt-laden spray mists against her face but she doesn’t look away, can’t take her eyes off the spinning wake. She won’t go inside to the heat and the other passengers – this is where it feels right. It’s the cleanest she’s felt in a long time and even though others come and stand for a few moments, or the length of time it takes to smoke a cigarette, then scrunch their shoulders and retreat to one of the lounges, she stays, sitting on one of the narrow wooden seats. She’s never seen anything that looked so cool and clean as this but is glad that she didn’t see it when she felt the way she did, because she knows that she would have climbed the rails and given herself to it, plunged without fear or hesitation into its arms. But those moments have almost gone and for the first time she can lift her head and think that if it is the past she sees tumbling away, then there has to be some future. For her, for Martin, for Tom. She’s left Tom playing the machines and is glad when she thinks how pleased he was when she gave him Rachel’s mobile phone, the way he treated it with respect, the way he understood wha
t he was being given.
She touches her hair and feels the sheen of moisture, then ploughs her hand back through it, letting her fingers run across her scalp. When she’s at her sister’s she’s going to get it cut, try to force some shape back into it. When they were girls they must have spent hours combing and grooming each other, plaiting and enjoying elaborate experiments. Making each other beautiful. Parading down the hall like models on a catwalk. She wonders if she can ever be beautiful again, or if it’s gone for ever, unravelling and fraying with the forward roll of time. She wonders if a man will ever look at her again and smile, taking her in with his eyes, if Martin will ever reach across the emptiness of the bed and pull her into his arms. She watches the furrowed sea buckle and swell again, its surface reforming in the distance and she wonders, too, if there are unseen parts of her which have died with her child. Sometimes she thinks she feels an emptiness in the heart of her womb, a pain in the quick of her being, but tells herself that it’s in her head and not her body. She slips her hand through the folds of her clothes and lets it rest on her stomach, kneads and smoothes the round looseness of her skin, then softly hums some half-forgotten lullaby to herself, as if soothing a child into sleep.
A few things are clear now. She knows she’s not going back to work in the canteen. Too many smells, too much heat burrowing into her, too many faces of other people’s children pressing against her. She thinks she’d like to go back to education and take some night classes, get better qualifications and look around for a different type of job. She smiles as she wonders whether, if she worked really hard, she could come close to getting a star. That would be something. Really something. Then perhaps she might get some kind of office job where she had her own desk and chair, where there wasn’t a scream of voices constantly shouting, where she didn’t have to brush up food trodden into the floor. Maybe it’s only a foolish dream but she wants it to happen and in that moment it exists on the horizon like the dark bevel of land she can see with its steady, beckoning blink of light away to her right. The boat’s wake breaks and froths in a foam-filled trench of white. She’ll have to go and check on Tom soon. But not just yet. So she sits on, tilting her head to the sky and the beaded mist of spray, her hidden hand still resting on her stomach and her lips moving in a silent song, calming her child, stilling her beautiful lost child into the safe waters of sleep.
*
The machines are no good – stupid, boring card games where you bet on luck but the spinning cogs of the machine’s memory systems always allow it to win in the end. He hates it, too, when the boat sways and his feet have to struggle for a new balance. He thinks those seconds feel the way it must at the start of an earthquake when the earth shifts and searches for a new settlement. When it happens he clutches the sides of the machine and leans his weight on the controls, feeling them press into his stomach. He thinks about luck a lot but still has no answer as to why it should give itself to some and not to others. Just like this machine he plays, he tells himself there has to be some system, some programmed pattern of numbers that even when it seems random, has to be based on something. Perhaps even luck could be based on deserving, parcelled out only to those who have done something to deserve it. Over his shoulder he hears the laughing chink of money being paid out and he glances round for a second but sees nothing in the winner that distinguishes her from anyone else.
There is the smell of fried food from the cafeteria – he’s already seen people tucking into big happy plates of cooked breakfast where the yolks of sun shine and the sausages curl like smiling mouths. But he’s not going to be tempted because his stomach is queasy with the lurch of the sea and in the last week he’s started to feel that his body is not ballast – something that weights him to the world and gives him the protection of solidity like a moat or a castle wall – but something that holds him back from where he wants to go. And he’s started to realise where it is he wants to go and it’s in pursuit of money and a decent job because he thinks that it’s money helps you to run fast, takes you anywhere you want to go in the world. That it’s money is the wall that keeps you safe. What he wants to do is earn money, more money than anyone else and when in the future he sees Chapman, Rollo, Leechy and all the others like them standing on the same street corner, he’ll be smiling out at them from the wheel of his black car with its tinted glass and when he lowers his electric window, he’ll give them the finger before leaving them forever in his dust and never have to see them again.
Something else has started to happen to him. The thought of it is still edged with a flush of shame because it doesn’t seem right. His relationship with Lara is changing. Now as she runs, he has the type of thoughts he’s never had before and he’s started to look at her in different ways, sometimes slipping into a fantasy where she’s almost overpowered by the dogs and he bursts in and saves her and she turns her tiger eyes to him and smiles her thanks. Sometimes as he plays, he finds himself stirring and stiffening to the encouragement of her sighs and sometimes when he’s sleeping it’s his name she calls over and over, and even in the dampness and embarrassment of the morning light he senses for a fleeting second what it must be like to be loved.
But it’s not just Lara. He’s started to look at girls, just like he’s looking at this girl beside him playing the machine where she’s won the money and he was wrong – there are things which distinguish her from others. There’s the shiny fall and curve of her hair, the creamy pale spots the size of coins on her temples where her hair is clipped back, the slender shape of her body inside her clothes, the rounded perfection of her upturned heel as she stands with one foot on tiptoe. He’d like to go up behind her and envelop her in the tightness of his arms, make her love him, but instead he says, ‘How did you manage to win?’ Without looking up and without breaking her concentration, she answers, ‘Pure luck, just pure luck.’ He wants some of that pure luck, thinks he can find it if he tries hard enough but then as her game ends she looks up at him for the first time and he sees how he looks in her eyes. He turns away and takes the first door he can find which leads out to a deck. Though the wind slaps his face with its coldness and stings his eyes, he walks along its deserted length until he finds a tight little space where he wedges himself for shelter.
He thinks of Rachel and for the first time realises that in all the time they were brother and sister they never spoke to each other, not about anything that was important so she never knew what he felt and he has no idea about what went on inside her head. It makes him sad, conscious of the terrible waste, and he tries to think of some way that he can make up for it, make amends, but there is only the slice and whip of the wind as it shreds the skin off the sea. Then as he huddles in his narrow metal crevice, his hand touches the mobile phone and he thinks that maybe there is a way and he doesn’t know if it’s a real way or a stupid, childish, pretend way but he’s driven by a need that he’s never felt before and which scares him a little bit. So taking the phone he holds it to his ear and after a few moments he speaks in it. Speaks to her. And he tells her he’s sorry he wasn’t a better brother, that he wasn’t able to look out for her. He tells her, too, that sometimes she was a snobby bitch who looked down her nose at him because he wasn’t as smart as her and as the wind whines and frets the waves he tells her with shame and sadness that there were times he hated her because he thought that she had taken all the luck in their family and that there wasn’t any left for him. And because she had all the luck she got almost all their parents’ love so he only got the little bit that was left and that wasn’t fair. It wasn’t friggin’ fair. He feels the first tears start, tells himself that it’s the spray of the sea. He tells her that everything’s going to be different for him now though, because he’s going to work hard, learn all the things he needs and shape himself into something better. Tells her it’s really sad for him that she won’t be there to help him when he doesn’t know how to do things, because he needs lots of help. And one of the thing he needs help with, because he doesn’t
know what he’s supposed to do, is Mum and Dad. He tells her he’s scared and that if they go on like this something terrible’s going to happen but he doesn’t know what he can do to stop it, so if she knows will she please tell him. He listens for some answer, some voice on the end of the phone, but all he hears is the restless moan of the rising wind. His tears taste of salt. He catches them on the tip of his tongue, tells himself that it’s the spray of the sea.
*
He’s driven through the estate but there’s no sign of the black four-wheel drive and then something Rob said comes back into his mind and he drives back out the short distance to the private leisure complex. As he approaches it he can see the floodlit tennis courts and the outdoor pool behind the high fencing. He follows a car into the car park, drives slowly round. It’s full of BMWs, expensive cars and scores of four-wheel drives and it takes him a few minutes before he finds the one he’s looking for, with its tinted glass and personalised number plate. It’s parked up near the doors. He stops behind it and checks again that it’s the right one. He’s sure.
Two women in crisp ice-blue tracksuits are going through the entrance doors, their sports bags slung snugly on their shoulders. Even their hair is the same blonde colour. He sits in his parked car and watches a family come out, the mother and father holding the arms of their son so he can swing between them, then stopping to give the other boy his turn. It feels like a different world through the doors, a world that is far from his own and one in which he doesn’t belong. It stirs a new sense of his anger because he knows there are people out there whose lives never cross the rigid boundary lines which separate them from what is dirty or unpleasant, people who never get closer than television pictures. But then if someone had offered him the chance to join them, to be a member of their club, he would have taken it. But no one’s going to ask him, no one’s ever going to want him or his family as members and that’s all right because he knows now that he’s on his own, more on his own than he’s ever been. With this knowledge comes no sense of loneliness, instead only a feeling of lightness and the freedom to do what has to be done. Before he had told himself that it was for Rachel, but it was always a lie and he knows that it’s for him, for his pain, for the future that’s been ripped from him. The truth can never hurt. So it’s finally time for him to bring to book, to pay back. Time for him to take his stance like the man he’s almost forgotten how to be.
