"Trust me, Ma."
Marshall persuaded his hands to loosen their grip—his face was throbbing like a wound—and glimpsed darkness toppling toward him. It was the shadow of the town hall, and it was snatched away at once to let the sun at him. When he tried to mask his eyes with his hands held close to them, the stops and starts of the bus kept making him thump himself in the face. Whenever he peered between his fingers the sun knifed his eyes, or he saw sights he couldn't cope with—a railroad train sprouting from the air in front of him, or rooms with people hanging head downward in them being dragged through a canal, or traffic falling into an abyss beside the road. If he kept his eyes covered he saw multicoloured cartoon shapes capering toward him, and felt himself turning into a cartoon, so that he didn't dare look at himself. He made his fingers part, only to see clouds come to a complete halt in the sky and shake themselves like sheep and move off. Then the boy pinched his shoulder, and for a moment which seemed to contain all the hope and peace in the world Marshall thought the pinch had wakened him from the nightmare. "Don't go off yet," the boy said "We're the next stop."
The world spun at two speeds, fast inside the bus and faster outside, as Marshall turned to him and then lunged after him so as not to be left alone with the only other passenger upstairs, a woman's body sitting three seats behind him, holding a carrier bag full of vegetables with ahead piled on top. The stairs clanked underfoot like a machine that was running down as he fled, his hooves striking the floor of the horse-box just as the roar of the world cracked open the glass side of it. When the boy stepped through the opening and became a head shorter, Marshall could only leap after him.
The world thumped his heels, and he staggered a few paces while he discovered whether his bruised feet could still walk. The bus shut its driver into his cell and set off in pursuit of the rest of the migration. The shrill hiss of tires pierced the unending thunder with which the road was loaded, and the shrillness transformed the sunlight into lightning which flickered without ever going out. Maybe it was shivering on his behalf, because he had no idea where he was.
It wasn't just another symptom. This wasn't any road he'd seen before. He was standing alongside a block of shops like boxes thrown together in an attic with a few old safes, incomprehensible slogans scrawled across their metal fronts. Even the shops that might be open were crisscrossed with grey mesh. Sections of old signs were visible between some of the signs over the shops, as if the row was about to revert to its previous self. Some of the windows above the signs were broken, and he saw their frames begin to warp and sag as he held out his artificial hands to the boy. "Why did we get off here? You said you knew where we were going."
"Bet your arse I do, Ma. There was a diversion, only you didn't see it for hiding your face. We just have to walk a bit. You can do that, can't you, lad?"
Marshall had to, feeling sweat being squeezed out of his feet and the backs of his knees with each step. He could smell himself, his panic. Red and green cartoons kicked their legs in the air as he followed his keeper across the halves of the road which had gone through the mirror, evom eht no elpoep. Now the boy was leading him along the sidewalk past a strip of turf sown with fragments of newspaper headlines, perhaps about Marshall or about the murder at the shop he should be going back to, and planted with trees as thin as his arm, their frayed ends wired into the electric sky. The sky was up to its tricks again, grinding to a halt and having to shake itself in order to move off, tweaking the roofs of huddles of low flat-faced houses the color of sodden sand. Marshall had wandered past quite a length of these while he shielded his eyes from the sight of drowned rooms floating by in glass tanks before he realised he was no longer following. The boy had stopped to lift a fence in front of a house to its feet. "Don't go running off, Ma. Don't get lost when you don't know nobody but me."
Marshall stumbled back to him. "Where's this? This isn't where I live."
"No, it's where I do."
There was an aggressiveness, even a threat, in the boy's voice which made Marshall nervous of saying anything wrong, but that was the least of his fears under the jerky old film of the sky. "You said you'd take me home."
"Come in first. I want a drink. You can have one too if you want, a Coke. You like them, don't you?"
How did he know? Maybe he'd seen Marshall drinking Coke at school, or maybe he thought all Americans drank it. He opened the gate, which screeched over the stump of concrete path. "You can lie down if you want, Ma, then you might feel better."
Marshall took a step, feeling his leg haul his foot up and deposit it a few inches forward and somehow take the weight of his leaden body, and then another. "I don't want to stay long. I need to be with my mom."
"You don't want her seeing you looking like that, do you? Get in and I'll give you something you can take."
If he had the antidote to Marshall's condition, Marshall thought he would be mad to hesitate. He mustn't let himself wonder if he was already going mad. He conveyed the burden of himself onto the path between two untended plots of grass without even a headstone to mark them. "Thanks," he pronounced, trying to sound absolutely sincere, and thought of something else it would have been friendly of him to have said much earlier. "What's your name?"
His friend closed the gate, and the fence leaned its points toward Marshall. Now the boy was jabbing a hand at him to urge him toward the house, and slipping a metal glint out of his pocket as his neck whispered to itself. "Darren," he said.
20 Unknowing
Susanne had driven out of the car park and was accelerating through a gap in both directions of the traffic when she saw one of her students hurrying toward her along the sidewalk—Pik, his black pony-tail wagging. As she swung the Volvo parallel to the sidewalk he waved urgently. She stamped on the brake and switched on her hazard lights and stopped the car close to the curb, even though at this time of day the lane she was in was supposed to be reserved for buses. Her eyes met Pik's, and he smiled, far too fleetingly to be bringing her good news. She pressed the button to lower the passenger window with a finger which had grown clumsy and unsteady. The glass was inching down when Pik hesitated before running past the car. She saw him sprint across the crossing as the invitation to pedestrians began to falter, and seize a girl by the hand and whirl her to face him and set about kissing her on the mouth. He had been waving to her, not to Susanne at all. Of course he had no news of Marshall.
She mustn't worry, certainly not while she was driving. Marshall would be home by now, or on his way home, since he knew she was. She switched off the insect clicking of the hazard lights and steered the car out of the bus lane. "Just be there," she said aloud, and tried to stop remembering the day she'd driven home to find Don's message, but she couldn't forget while she was driving his car. She'd sold hers rather than get rid of his, and by now she'd found everything of his which remained in it—a street map of Manchester annotated in his handwriting, a thin pack of his business cards held by a rubber band which had snapped when she'd extracted one, a dolphin key ring which five-year-old Marshall had bought him for his birthday and which, though broken, he'd stashed in the glove box rather than throw it away. Worst of all had been two clips of bullets which he might have used to save his life and which she wished he had. By now she was able to use the vehicle without having her vision dissolve into a weepy blur, not much of the time anyway. Driving the car felt like being with him, made him seem present in at least a generalised sense, and now the impression appealed to her as a reassurance that she was close to seeing Marshall, since she sensed no ominousness. "We'll look after him," she murmured. She could already see the Indian restaurants ahead, and a minute later she was surrounded by them, and then they shrank into her mirror as she made the first turn. Right, and right again, as the lengths of street grew shorter and narrower. Mrs. Satterthwaite's mongrel lifted its head above the garden gate on the corner and gave a token bark which sounded like a signal as the Travis house came into view. Whatever the bark might have signified, it w
asn't that Marshall was waiting outside. No doubt he was in the house.
The scent of lavender rose to meet her as she opened her gate. She parted her lips but didn't speak, and shook the Yale key forward from her bunch of keys and slid it into the lock. It turned easily, but nothing further happened when she pushed at the cold metal plate. The mortise was still locked, and Marshall wasn't home.
She found the mortise key and turned it in the mechanism and palmed the door open. The inner door imitated its movement, and the alarm announced itself. She heeled the front door shut with a vigour that sent her along the hall in time to dig the key into the alarm panel just as its siren raised its shriek. The sound invaded her nerves like a drill finding a tooth, and the silence which followed only left them aching. The answering machine showed one call recorded: her own. At least there was no message about Marshall, but also none from him.
He would have called if he didn't intend to be home any minute. She mustn't let herself start speculating whether he'd thought he would be and had then been prevented somehow, because if that was the case there was no reason to suppose that anything bad had happened to him. She snatched the fistful of keys away from the alarm panel and threw them in her purse, and marched herself to her kitchen, where she raided the freezer for a tinfoil carton of her homemade bolognese sauce, Marshall's favourite of her dinners. She set it down next to the microwave. There was no point in doing any more with it until she knew that Marshall would be home by dinner time, which obviously he would be, and much earlier if he knew what was good for him. "We'll be having a few words about how not to worry people, young man," she said, and heard the empty house displaying her talking to herself. She tramped back along the hall to grab her case full of essays awaiting grades, but left it on the stairs and made for Marshall's room.
She didn't know what she expected to find. She already knew why he'd abandoned school; what else needed explaining? She turned the doorknob and fell the door pull stealthily away, as it always did as soon as it was opened. She let the knob slip from her grasp, and saw the shelves stuffed with books, as though the room was an extension of Don's shop. The door crept open further and showed her Marshall's school uniform lying on the bed.
Why was the sight of the sloughed clothes dismaying? Because if he had been home she would have expected him to wait for her or, failing that, to leave her a message. Didn't he feel able to tell her what he'd done? Had she lost that much contact with him? No, the lack of a message implied that he'd expected to be home by the time she was, and maybe he was coming up the street right now. She hurried into her room and past the bed that was twice as wide as it needed to be, and gazed over the balcony at the street, which was deserted. She gazed until she became conscious of trying to magic him into sight, and then she made herself go downstairs to work.
She took her case into the front room and moved a low table in front of a chair from which she could see through the window, and lifted the stack of essays out of the case, and tried to concentrate. "Realistic fiction is a contradiction in terms..." "There are no such things as violent fiction films, only films pretending to be violent..." She wondered if her students had caught a tendency to aphorise from her, and glanced up to see who was strutting down the street, but it was a magpie black and white as Marshall's uniform. "Films showing violence as it really is could never be shown commercially." Her pencil hesitated alongside that until a movement rose above the garden fence—again the magpie, perching on the fence and flying off once Susanne's head jerked up. If she couldn't focus her attention on the essays better than that, perhaps she ought to take them to another room, except she didn't think she could. She drew the essay closer to her and bent her head over it, and the phone rang.
She shoved the pages away, trying not to crumple them, and snatched her feet from beneath the table and jumped up. By now the phone had rung twice, and she was desperate to answer it before it reached the fifth ring and the machine took over, in case Marshall or whoever else was calling thought she wasn't there. It shrilled twice more as she ran into the hall, grabbing so wildly at the receiver that it flew out of her hand. "Hello?" a voice repeated, growing as Susanne clapped the receiver to her ear. "Hello?"
It was a woman, someone she'd spoken to recently—the school secretary? "Yes?" Susanne gasped, feeling and sounding as if she'd just run a race.
"Mrs. Travis?"
"Yes." When that didn't produce an immediate response Susanne added, "Susanne Travis, yes."
"I only ask because the last time I spoke to another American lady. Is it convenient to talk just now?"
The voice seemed to be compensating for Susanne's urgency by slowing itself down, broadening its vowels and pronouncing each syllable almost like a separate word. Perhaps that was why the question sounded ominous. "I—" Susanne said, and made herself ask, "What about?"
"No very significant development, I'm afraid. I wondered if there had been any at your end." The woman laughed, as slowly as she spoke. "Did I forget to identify myself, by the way? My apologies. This is Iris Pendle, the—"
"The bookseller, yes, I know."
"The bookseller, yes," Iris Pendle said, and paused as a further rebuke. "You'll recall we spoke about your late husband's business."
"I do."
"I was wondering whether anyone else in the trade had expressed an interest."
Susanne was imagining Marshall trying to phone her and finding the line busy, and then... "A few," she said, and considered not giving too much away, but just now negotiating the best deal hardly seemed to matter. "Not for the whole of the stock like you did."
"That's often the way. I'd still be prepared to make you an overall offer if I get the bank's approval."
"Oh, you need that."
"Most businesses do in these troubled times. I thought if you're agreeable we might meet to discuss a final price."
Susanne could only answer as succinctly as possible. "When?"
"I was thinking tomorrow, when I'll be on an expedition to Manchester. I know you Americans are fond of lunch. Would you be free for a sandwich?"
"Where? What time?"
"I'll do my best to fall in with your day."
"Say, say—" Susanne was wishing the bookseller would. "Twelve under the University clock, the tower, you know, on Oxford Road."
"I'll be in a pale green Nissan estate."
"I'll be looking for you," Susanne said, and was about to thank her for calling when she rang off, leaving Susanne uncertain whether she should have been quite so prepared to meet tomorrow, although why not? The arrangement she'd just made sounded a little like meeting a criminal, a kidnapper, but there was no reason whatsoever for her to begin to think along those lines—sure, some of the Fancy family had waylaid Marshall on his way home and made him change out of his uniform and then kidnapped him. The thought of him made him seem more present, maybe outside the house, steeling himself to face her. She housed the receiver and hurried to open the front door.
Someone moved—ducked out of sight. Why would anyone be hiding from her? She ran to the gate and was about to call "Hello" when Hilda Mattison reappeared beyond the hedge of the house diagonally opposite, wearing overalls even wider than herself and brandishing a pair of garden shears, whose clipping Susanne became aware of having heard for minutes. "All right, love?" her neighbour inquired.
"Pretty much, Hilda. Just looking for Marshall."
"Give a yell if you like, nobody minds round here. I used to do that with our three when they were older than him, and they'd come quick enough."
"Maybe I'll try that," Susanne said, and hoping this was more of a fib "You won't have seen him."
"I've been in and out most of the day."
"You won't have, then."
"Oh yes."
Hilda snipped an inch off a twig of privet as abruptly as she tended to end conversations, and Susanne felt the gate dig into her midriff. "Pardon me, when was he here?"
"As far as I know, not since he said how are you doing to
me or whatever it was he said. Well, I never realised that before. That's what some Americans mean when they say howdy, isn't it? Strange, the things you suddenly understand after you've been hearing them for years. Anyway, that was the last I've seen of him, when I was taking in the milk."
"When he was on his way to school."
" 'Fraid so," Hilda admitted with a tinge of defiance. "Don't go running off with the idea we always sleep in that late. Matt and I had a bit of a knees-up at a Conservative Club do last night and couldn't drive home till some of the pop wore off."
Susanne had never been able to work out whether Hilda's husband's first name was Matt or any version of it, and she was angry with herself for being bothered by the question now. She glanced along the street, and then her shoulders drooped. "Savage creatures, those," Hilda said as though agreeing with her, and the magpie darted away around the corner. "I really think they delight in it. I've seen them tear starlings to pieces and leave them after one mouthful."
Susanne was in no mood to be reminded that anything revelled in violence. "Well, watching isn't going to bring him."
"Like the kettle," Hilda said, and not quite so enigmatically. "Do you want me to keep an eye open?"
"You could. To tell you the truth—" Susanne was less than certain that she wanted to, but she could hardly stop now. "Apparently he's been playing hooky. That's why I'm like this."
The One Safe Place Page 26
