Tragic Silence

by E. C. Hibbs

  “Are you alright?” she asked, her Hungarian wavering.

  “Yes, thank you,” I replied, stooping down to collect my book from where I’d dropped it. It had landed on an open tray of watercolour pencils, and I checked it over, worried that some of the pages would have green and orange smudges across them.

  The girl hadn’t moved away. She’d taken up my messenger bag and was holding it out for me. I grasped the strap with a small nod of thanks. Her eyes were large: the colour of walnuts; and her thick auburn hair reached just past shoulder-length. Together, the rich browns seemed to mirror the shine of the tiger’s eye teardrop pendant around her neck. And when she smiled, it didn’t stay confined to her lips, but spread across her whole face.

  “What did you do to them?” I asked, glancing down the corridor in the direction I supposed the boys had taken.

  She chuckled to herself. “Nothing. I just told them to get lost.”

  I cocked an eyebrow. “Really? That’s never worked for me. It sounded like you punched one of them or something!”

  “Oh, no, I’d probably break my fingers if I tried to hit anyone!” she said, and then held out her hand. “I’m Lucy Denborough.”

  The fall continued and I left the memory behind. I wondered how many miles now stood between me and the hospital bed. A hundred? Perhaps even a thousand? It was impossible to tell. There was nothing to measure my progress by, and any hint of light that may have been above was long gone.

  I saw myself sitting with Lucy that very same day she had spoken to me. Opposite one another in the cafeteria, and over the cacophony of teenage yells, we became tentative friends. Five years ago, she explained that her father had been employed at a software company just across the river in Buda. Her family had moved from London to be with him at the start of the summer, and both she and her sister Emily were studying at the same school as me.

  Lucy came to sit beside me in history class, and we met at break times and outside of school. I often imagined that the two of us would someday work together: that we’d set up our own company and travel all over the world as archaeologists. But more than anything, it would just be two friends having a great time together, just as we did every day of our lives.

  A few months after the storeroom incident, Lucy gave me my nickname. My real name is Bianka Farkas. Farkas is quite a common surname in Hungary. It means ‘Wolf’. Bianka means ‘White.’ But when Lucy found me in the school library, hidden behind a tower of books as I worked at an essay, she chuckled and muttered to herself:

  “Busy as a bee, you are.”

  She said it in English, and I looked up – partially surprised to hear her talk in her own language, but also because it sounded like she’d said the first part of my name. I knew English; I’d learned it when I was younger, so I understood what she’d said, but it still came as the occasional shock to hear its words in a school full of Hungarians.

  Miss Busy Bee was how she came to know me, as well as Emily and their parents, William and Charlotte. It was gradually shortened to Bee, but I didn’t mind. I liked it.

  The buzzing of insect wings bounced off the inside of my skull. I went to raise my arms and swat at the air in front of me, but I couldn’t move. The wind turned to screams. They were desperate and pleading, begging for me to be spared. They were Lucy’s.

  Thunder rolled like gigantic wheels through the sky. Rain fell, and the whole world seemed like a graphite drawing, waiting to be smudged. I heard its monotonous tapping on the classroom window as my crazy science teacher spoke.

  “Every stimulus that we might see, hear, smell, or touch is the capture of some moment in time. No matter how small, it’s in the past; because of the split-second it takes for our brains to process the information. Everything that we perceive in this world is a memory.”

  Bloody rain fell onto my face, and I felt my feet touch down on the sodden ground. I was walking. I had no control over where. I was a tiny spark lodged in the back of my own mind, unable to escape or be heard. But I knew exactly what was happening even before my eyes involuntarily opened.

  I was walking home from school, through the cemetery. There was a gravel path crunching underfoot, and water welled up around my shoes with every step. Students who lived in the area used the cemetery as a shortcut to get to both the university and the high school. It saved walking through the maze of backstreets and a shopping district, which was always brimming with crowds, and would guarantee being late for a class. If you didn’t look to the left, out into the graves, you would never have thought about where I was. Some kids had vandalised a few of the monuments and came through shouting wildly – and indeed, the majority of the defaced stones were the ones close to the path, because not many people ventured too far. It was an unmapped labyrinth; with the graves becoming older the further in you went. In the outermost distance, you could sometimes make out the elaborate carvings and mausoleums of the past century’s turn. They were mainly hid by creeping grass and the newer dead, as they struggled to find space of their own.

  I’d taken that route ever since I started high school, but whenever I went through, I kept quiet. I wanted to give the deceased their due respect. But I was never bothered by such close proximity to that place. Most of the students who used the shortcut weren’t, but not many of them lived as near to it as I did. Although large and sprawling, with the oldest graves dating back to the late 1700s, the path was well-worn by teenage feet and I probably could have walked the route blindfolded.

  Lucy was beside me. I was holding up an umbrella to protect us from the freezing shower, but my coat was still saturated, and I’d started shivering as soon as I set foot outside. She rubbed her hands together to try and get some warmth into them, then reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone to check the time. It was a light green colour with a matte finish, the charms hanging from the hinge tinkling as we walked. There was a pink L in old-fashioned font, and a small yellow duck with a rounded face and giant cartoon eyes.

  She tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear. Wet through and in the muted light straining through the clouds, it looked more of a dark red, stretching over her shoulders like dripping icicles. She glanced at my chest, where she’d pinned a sparkly badge reading 18 TODAY! That morning, I’d tried to protest, but she hadn’t taken any notice, and insisted that I wear it all day or else she wouldn’t give me my present for another week. I let my eyes flicker to the large bag hanging over her hip, where the gift was concealed. I could tell from the way the material had stretched that it was large, whatever it was. I was somewhat surprised that she’d managed to fit it inside.

  She caught me looking and laughed. I had to chuckle, too. She had one of those brilliant laughs, as effective as being tickled: once she started – no matter how down you were or how long your day had been – you had to stop and join in with her.

  “I don’t know how you do it,” I muttered. I heard my words without speaking them, as somewhere in the distance, I continued to fall down through that tunnel of blood.

  “Do what?”

  It’s been raining for a week, you’ve got a test on Friday, and you haven’t stopped grinning at all! I don’t know how you can be like that.”

  Right on cue, Lucy’s smile widened. “Is that a bad thing?”

  I smiled back in reply, even though I knew it didn’t carry anything of the natural gesture she could bear with ease. My face just wasn’t the type that held grins well. They always looked strained, even if I was so happy that I couldn’t hold them back.

  We passed through the spiked gates that signalled the boundary of the cemetery, and stepped out onto my street. The houses were tall, thin terraces, each with a flight of steps leading up to the door. The windows lit up as people retired for the evening, leaving cars parked uniformly on the road outside. The views weren’t much, but once you were outside, and walked westwards, you could eventually see the Danube snaking away, with the outline of Buda Castle just visible in the distance over the sparkling water.<
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  I looked at Lucy, and started. Her expression had suddenly dropped, as though a shadow had passed across her face. I went to ask her what was wrong, but her old self immediately returned, and I put it to the back of my mind as we reached my house. The living room light was switched on, although the car was gone. Anya was already home from work, but Apa had stayed behind to finish a project, and wasn’t expected to return for another few hours. Lucy and I continued on past the door, heading further into the Izabella Street complex towards the cinema.

  Eventually we arrived, and hurried inside before selecting the next film that would begin showing. We had decided to take a chance, as since we wouldn’t be finishing school until the afternoon, beggars couldn’t be choosers. The Phantom of the Opera was agreed on; we paid for our tickets, and then moved down the darkened back of the foyer to find our seats in the designated auditorium.

  Inside, there were quite a few people, but we were still able to get a good view of the screen. The cinema was dated and there were heavy old-fashioned curtains framing the white panel, but I hadn’t visited often and felt they added to the experience. In fact, before I met Lucy, I had never even tasted popcorn.

  Eventually, the lights dimmed; hushed conversations silenced and the movie began to roll. It was in English, but there were Hungarian subtitles running along the bottom. Lucy didn’t seem to mind, even though she was fluent in the two languages. I noticed the small grin playing at the corner of her mouth. She loved musicals. In her bedroom, the shelves were crammed full of the old Rogers and Hammerstein films, and she could happily sit and watch them all, one after the other.

  Emily had wanted to join us, but she and her class were away on a school trip to Rákosliget in the far east of Budapest, and wouldn’t be back until later that evening. I didn’t see her as much as I used to, because of the change in timetables for all of us, but we’d stayed friends. Lucy acted somewhat like a contact, keeping us both up to date with the other. Unlike the two of us, Emily still wasn’t sure of what she wanted to do when she finished school. It was presumed that she’d go to university. I always thought she’d be an artist. She was the complete opposite of her more science-orientated sister in that respect; Lucy’s drawing abilities were strongly limited to stick figures.

  I imagined her holding her own exhibition at a gallery somewhere as the film started to open up around us. It played on, and I silently read the script aloud in my head as the words were spoken and the songs sung. The music filled the room; the story became alive. Engrossed, I picked up my plastic cup of water from the seat armrest and took a sip.

  Lucy screamed. I jumped as water shot down my throat and splattered over my face. I clamped a hand across my mouth to muffle a cough and then glanced at her. Her eyes were wide with shock, and frantically searching a dark corner underneath the screen. I looked too, but couldn’t see anything.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked, alarmed. Her face had drained of colour and she shook her head, leaping to her feet and hurrying down the aisle. A few people who’d been sitting near us watched as she flew out of the door; then muttered in annoyance before turning their attentions back to the film.

  My heart sped up and I quickly followed. There were no signs of her in the corridor, so I tried the women’s bathroom, and found her bent over a sink. She cupped her hands together under the tap and brought them up, splashing cold water on her cheeks. She looked up at herself in the mirror, and yelped as she noticed me behind her.

  “Hey, hey, it’s alright, it’s me!” I assured quickly. She relaxed and then closed her eyes, holding a hand to her forehead. I asked if she was alright, but she only nodded woodenly. Her other hand was clamped around the rim of the granite sink unit, knuckles white.

  I got to her and gently held her shoulder. “What happened?”

  Lucy turned to me. “You didn’t see him?”

  I was shocked at the desperation in her voice. “Who?”

  “The guy in the corner! I’ve been seeing him for days, watching me! It was him, I’m sure of it!”

  I remembered her eyes hunting around in the shadows. “He’s been watching you? Are you sure?”

  Lucy gave a shaky nod. “Igen, positive. He’s in there. Or, he was...”

  I ran my tongue over my lips, wondering why she hadn’t told me this before. It sounded as though whoever he was, he’d been stalking her, and had really upset her. I’d never seen her like this before. I asked what he looked like, in case I could remember seeing him anywhere. She closed her eyes.

  “Tall, thin... black shoulder-length hair. He was dressed all in black, too. Early or mid twenties, I think? I couldn’t really tell. But not old.”

  I thought back, trying to think if I’d noticed anyone there that matched her description, but nothing came to mind. I believed her, though, so I supposed I’d been too focused on the film.

  “Alright,” I said, making up my mind, “stay here. I’m going to get our stuff and then we’ll go back to mine for a while.”

  She didn’t contradict me, and that alone showed me the reality of how shaken she was. I rushed back into the auditorium to gather our coats and bags, leaving the bucket of half-eaten popcorn behind. I let Lucy have a few moments to collect her nerves before fishing my torch out of the side-pocket of my bag, and beginning to lead the way back. The rain had eased off whilst we’d been in the cinema and dwindled to a faint drizzle. A chilly mist was beginning to form in the air, and grey patterns swam in the torch beam. The lights of the streetlamps glowed like ghostly orange spectres hanging above the road. Both of us kept glancing about nervously, and all of the shadows seemed menacing.

  Eventually, we arrived on the steps of my house, and I handed Lucy the torch as I found my keys and twisted them in the lock. I pushed the door open and ushered her in out of the cold. Anya’s head appeared from behind the back of one of the armchairs. Her hair was wrapped up in a towel, the damp aroma of citrus shower gel hanging in the air.

  She smiled. “Was the movie good?”

  “We didn’t see the end of it. We left early,” I explained hurriedly before telling Lucy to sit down.

  My Anya was one of those wonderful mothers who could immediately tell when something was wrong, and she had a way of making you feel so at home and loved that things instantly began feeling better. She only had to take one look at Lucy’s face before she’d shot into the kitchen, taken some dough from the fridge and proceeded to stuff and fry it. Not long after, the two of us were sitting with a fresh Gundel pancake each.

  “Bianka, we’re almost out of eggs,” she said to me. “Go round to Mrs. Fekete’s house tomorrow and buy some off her, will you?”

  I nodded. Mrs. Fekete lived in the house at the end of the street, close to the cemetery wall. Because of that, her back garden was slightly larger than the others’, and she somehow managed to keep a small coop of chickens, selling their eggs to the neighbours for eight hundred forints a dozen. I never thought it was possible to have chickens in the middle of a city until she moved in.

  Our house wasn’t exactly spacious, but it was comfortable. It consisted of an open-plan living room and kitchen, with the bathroom and three bedrooms up a flight of adjacent stairs. One of the bedrooms had been converted into a study for Apa and Anya, but Lucy had often joked that my own room was more of a study itself. There was my bed, a sofa that she slept on whenever she stayed over, and shelves upon shelves of books and films. But the living room was the cosiest of them all: the carpets were soft, and the sofa and armchairs so old they seemed to swallow you whole in their cushions. The furniture all sat in front of the open-hearth fireplace, burning high with logs and sending heat coursing through the whole house.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked Lucy through a mouthful of pancake. We were alone; not long after she had finished cooking, the phone had rung and Anya had run upstairs to answer it. From the time it was taking, I presumed it had something to do with work.

  Lucy smiled. I was relieved to see that her cheeks w
ere pink again. “Much better,” she said, licking some chocolate sauce off her finger.

  I nodded, pleased; then reached out for her plate, balancing it on top of my own as I returned them both to the kitchen. “Listen,” I told her, “you can stay here tonight, if you want. I’ve got mathematics tomorrow morning, but I know you’re free for the first lesson. You can leave whenever you want.”

  Lucy stretched her arms and rubbed her knuckles into her eyes. “Nem, it’s alright, thanks. I need to revise for that test and I don’t have any notes with me. I might go home now actually.” She stifled a yawn. “I feel very tired after all that.”

  I dropped the plates into the sink and glanced at her. “Are you sure? If this guy’s for real and he’s stalking you or something—”

  “I’ll be fine,” she assured. “I think I just need to get a good night’s sleep.”

  “Well, I’m coming with you, then.”

  Lucy shook her head gently. “No, I’ll text my Dad; he can pick me up at the end of the road. I’ll wait here until he arrives.”

  I came back and sat down again as she flipped open her phone and began typing. She lived on the other side of the river, in a tangle of streets just across the Chain Bridge. Whenever she spent the day with me, her father often braved the traffic to collect her in his car.

  “Promise me that you’ll phone the police tomorrow as well, tell them about this guy. They can keep a watch for him.”

  “I will.”

  Satisfied, I let it lie, and leant back against the cushions.

  “Oh!” Lucy suddenly gasped, and reached over her shoulder to her bag. She hauled it around in front of her – straining with the amount of textbooks she’d crammed inside – then unzipped it and handed me an envelope and a long, flat parcel wrapped in shiny blue paper.