The Truants

by Lee Markham

  John was unsure of the man’s tone. There was something beneath it. Something that hadn’t been there before. Something hard. John didn’t like it. And he responded like he always had. Badly. ‘You think you can tell me what to do? You think a few days in your fancy fuckin’ house with your bread and shit and I’m gonna just do what you want me to do?’

  ‘You are going to do what you have to do to put right everything that you have made wrong.’

  John jumped down from his stool at that and snarled up at his host, ‘I ain’t done nothing. You can fuck off. You don’t know me. What the fuck do you know about what I done?’

  ‘You know already that I know precisely what you’ve done. You’ve killed a child. And you’ve unleashed a plague. And now you’re going to help me clear up your mess.’

  ‘Or what?’

  Rider glared at the child for a short moment and then simply laughed kindly at him. ‘Oh John. You know that the options are endless. We could dine on you tonight instead of one of the pigs. How about that? I could just put you out and send you away. But you know we won’t. No. If you don’t help me I’ll just have to send you home.’

  ‘I won’t go.’

  The man swept up the mug and poured the untouched coffee down the sink. He watched it swirl down the plughole and talked softly over his shoulder. ‘You’ll go wherever we decide to put you, John. Whether you stay there or not will indeed be entirely up to you. But they’re all looking for you. You have something they want, you see? They want it more than anything. And they’d do anything to get it. They’d do anything to make you tell them where it is. And they’d probably do even more if you told them you didn’t know where it was.’ The man ran the cold tap for a moment to rinse the sink, shut it off, turned and dried his hands on a tea towel. ‘You’ve read the papers. You know how they do things.’ He shrugged casually. ‘Up to you.’

  John was new to all of this. New to being stood up to. New to having nowhere to run to. New to responsibility. Cause and effect. He wasn’t very good at it. He was scared. He wasn’t new to that, but he was new to admitting it. But he didn’t need to admit it. Rider knew. And he had John over a barrel.

  ‘Do you think it will all just go away if you don’t do something about it?’

  John looked down at his hands. ‘No. I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do.’

  ‘What do you think you have to do?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ He wailed. ‘I just know I don’t want to go back. I don’t ever want to go back.’

  Rider walked across to the child and put his hand on his shoulder. ‘I never said you had to go back.’

  ‘Then what? What do I have to do?’

  The man put a phone in his hand. ‘Don’t you think it’s time you called home? Told your mother you’re alright?’

  John looked up at him like he had completely lost the plot.

  Rider shrugged at the boy again, then nodded. ‘Maybe tell her you love her?’

  2

  It’s been three weeks since he’s gone and she almost believes it’s true. It’s been three weeks of ever-increasing fear and confusion out there on the estate, but she’s more or less immune to all that. She almost thinks she’s lucky. She’d had her hope pretty much extinguished from the get-go. They’d told her that her boy was dead and he hadn’t disappeared until a few hours after that. By that point she’d already accepted that he was gone. That they’d lost his body was now neither here nor there. There was plenty she didn’t understand. Plenty more she didn’t want to understand. Nothing seemed real any more.

  The first forty-eight hours had been the toughest. But she wonders if perhaps they were the toughest because all eyes were on her. And not all of those eyes had been sympathetic. Some of those eyes were looking to see if she’d had something to do with it. Because dead boys don’t disappear from hospitals. It was suspicious. And so there were whispers. But the deep swell of fear that had since swallowed the estate had absorbed any whispers directed at her and her boy. They quickly lost interest in the wake of what had followed.

  The disappearances. And the deaths.

  They’d asked her a lot of questions at the outset – police, family, friends, neighbours – but had quickly become distracted by more recent developments. They’d moved on. And the world had whipped itself up into a panic. The city was losing its mind. But these things didn’t trouble her. They didn’t touch her. They were happening in a different world. A million miles away. And that was fine by her.

  Because her boy was gone and he wasn’t coming back.

  She knew it. She knew it the moment they’d told her he’d been hurt.

  They’d arrived at the door and asked to come in. She’d looked at them, their grim faces, and she’d known. She’d shown them into the sitting room and had gone through to the kitchen and taken the pan of water off the heat. She’d turned off the gas that was frying the onions. They’d not be having bolognaise tonight. They’d not be having bolognaise ever again. She knew it. She knew it. She knew it.

  She’d turned off the cooker and counted to ten. Then she’d turned and gone through to hear them. One of them had been standing sombrely in front of the TV, the other one perched on the edge of the sofa, hat and hands in lap. They’d told her straight out. Hadn’t minced their words. They were very professional. And she’d appreciated that. As much as she could appreciate anything. She’d pulled her lips between her teeth, gently bitten down, held her composure, and had asked them where he was.

  They’d explained, and she’d asked them to take her to him. Then she’d got her coat and checked the lights were off before they left the flat.

  He’d been gone by the time they got there.

  Which was when the questions really started. Where was his father? Did she have any boyfriends? Was he being bullied? Had he mentioned anything to her? They hadn’t kept her too long. She’d told them she was tired and could she go home now?

  She hadn’t turned any lights on when she’d got in. She’d gone through to her room, in her coat and her shoes, and she’d lain on the bed and looked at the ceiling. She hadn’t cried. She barely even made a sound. She tried not to breathe. She tried not to blink. But in the end her body would oblige her. That’s just the way it was built. She felt guilty about that. Eventually she got tired, and eventually she slept. She’d felt guilty about even countenancing the idea of sleep, but it had crept up on her in the end and taken her away from it all. She hadn’t dreamt.

  When she’d awoken there had been a few moments when it had all been a dream. A heavenly interlude of untruth, swaddling her in the beautiful notion of her boy not being dead. It had been her shoes that had shattered that moment. The shoes still on her feet. On her bed. They were the vicious little detail that moored her to reality. It had been her shoes that had appropriately repositioned her existence from hope to despair and had reset the trajectory of her life ever since. It had been her shoes that had calibrated the sine wave of her grief. Set in motion the pendulum of her pain.

  But she hadn’t cried. She’d retreated into a middle distance somewhere between presence and detachment and she’d operated herself remotely from there.

  She’d gone through to his room and sat on his bed and looked at his bookshelf. Harry Potter. Asterix and Tintin. And a tiny part of her blamed them. The books. Because if he hadn’t been into his books, he would have been somewhere else, somewhere other than between the library and here, and it wouldn’t have happened.

  Over the coming weeks she thought about keeping a note of the things she found to blame. Because they were bizarre. She thought that maybe one day she’d look at that list and it might make her smile. That perhaps it might help someone else get through this. Maybe she could write a book. Maybe she could keep a list of the crazy things she could do to get through this. Like writing a book.

  She didn’t keep a list. She didn’t write a book. She never thought a day would come. Every day was every day and they were all the same because he wasn’t ther
e and the pendulum swung and the sine wave waved and she just rode it on through, immune to the tumult and horror that was washing up at her front door. Safe in her bubble of numb.

  And now it’s been three weeks. It’s been three weeks.

  It’s been three weeks since her boy was taken, since the world turned into a different world. And yet still she needs bread and milk. Other things too. How can the world no longer have him in it, and yet still consider a need for bread and milk not absurd? How could her body contain so much sadness and still find room for bread and milk? She should write that down. She doesn’t. She puts on her coat and she heads out to the shop. For bread and milk.

  She drifts through the tight walkways and underpasses like a phantom, a barely there shadow in the grander scheme of things. She is outside of time, and very nearly outside of space. A subatomic particle inhabiting the gaps between the grinding actualities of the urban machine. At the shop she doesn’t see the papers. The headlines. The cruel accrual of lost children and ragged corpses. She doesn’t see. She doesn’t care. She is elsewhere.

  Coming back from the store is the same, but in reverse. The empty carrier bags she’d taken with her – ever conscientious: always re-use – are now half full with the barest of essentials. Enough to see her through today. Maybe even tomorrow. Assuming there is such a thing.

  It is in the stairwell where he died that it happens.

  She has had to walk past the flowers laid there every day since they’d come to her door with the news. Not as many flowers as one might have expected. There would probably have been more had subsequent events not overtaken his demise. Stolen his moment in the jet-black spotlight. But the early adopters had got in there early and a few bunches of extended condolences still lay at the scene. Her eyes had seen them, day in, day out, but there’d been no connection. Nothing had reached her.

  But today she stops, and she sees them. And this time something stings her, a feeling crashes through, and for a moment the fog lifts and the agony of her loss is exposed in all its terrible glory. She looks at the flowers, wilting on the floor where her boy bled out, and she sees herself, and what she has become. What she is without him. She sees herself as an echo of a memory of a fleeting inspiration, so much less than once she was, with so much more to never do, and so much time to spend pretending that she is anything at all.

  She has spent so much time resisting the impetus to examine his pain in his last moments, to explore, perhaps even to taste, the fear he must have felt, the beautiful innocence that probably insisted on telling him everything would be fine, that she has missed her own pain. Her own overwhelming and all-consuming sadness.

  Because she didn’t die in the stairwell with blood on her trousers. She didn’t wonder what was happening when the world drifted into the glooming and abandoned him. No. She is still here, along with everyone else, just another bunch of failing memories and aspirations, a ruined vessel of hope and beauty. Just like the flowers here in the stairwell, like every black-spot bouquet, she was trying to feign relevance in the wake of what went before, and what went before was just as pointless.

  She breaks then.

  Her chin wobbles.

  She turns and runs up the stairs and fumbles with her keys. She lets herself in and falls back against the door, slides down it. The milk and the bread wait patiently beside her.

  And she weeps, and she wails, and she thinks of her boy, and understands that he is gone. And that she will never have bolognaise again.

  And neither will he.

  3

  Anna sat on the bench and waited for the boy.

  John hadn’t come home as they’d thought he would. He’d phoned. And he’d known they were there. That had been a surprise. Not a good one. And it had taken weeks.

  He’d spoken briefly to his mother and then asked to speak to them. He’d told them that he knew what they wanted. But that he wanted something in return. That was the only way they’d get the knife. And that if he didn’t get what he wanted, he’d take the knife to Ricky, and his horde of infected rats.

  He said he wanted his mother back.

  And that if he got her back he might let things lie.

  Filthy little rat-child. Disgusting little upstart.

  He knew too much. Wanted too much. How did he know so much?

  He would have to die. And he would. As would his mother.

  Just as soon as they had the knife.

  And so they’d agreed to meet him at the bench in the park. The bench.

  His suggestion.

  They didn’t like it.

  But what choice did they have?

  So here was Anna, sitting in the light of the lamp, waiting for the child.

  The sky was clear. Stars were out. The moon, half full, hung low in the sky. A fine ground mist blurred across the grass of the field. She sat there and she waited.

  Nothing. He was late.

  She didn’t think he’d come. But she had to wait. She had her instructions.

  Someone approached the bench from across the grass. She squinted her eyes, sharper now than ever before, but nonetheless delivering information that didn’t fit her expectations. The person heading towards her was an adult. Male. The possible hint of a limp. Couldn’t tell. Probably just a dog-walker.

  She looked left, and then right. No sign of the child. She looked at her watch.

  He’s not coming.

  Wait.

  She started to fidget. And worry. Something.

  The man approaching across the grass stepped into the outer circle of the light and stopped. He looked across the path at Anna, his hands behind his back. She looked at him, didn’t recognise him, and then continued her watch of the path. He had an ugly scar running into his hairline from his cheek.

  The man smiled quietly to himself and continued across the path and sat on the bench next to her. She locked eyes with him, and told him in no uncertain terms that it would be in his best interest to move along.

  His response threw her: ‘You don’t recognise me, my sweet?’ A smirking sadness in his eyes.

  She reiterated her advice for him to move along. That he had no idea what she was capable of. And that she was not there for whatever it was that he thought she might be there for.

  He turned away his face, looked out across the field and repeated his question. But this time he used the old language.

  Anna stiffened, her whole body possessed then by the oldone who sent her there. Her face a broiling stew of disbelief, incomprehension, betrayal and grief. The man looked back at her then: ‘There you are.’ He smiled softly at her and sighed.

  She turned sharply then and looked out across the empty space of the park. There were tears in her eyes. She managed one word: ‘Why?’

  The man looked down at his hands and shook his head. ‘What choice did you leave me? What should I have done?’

  ‘You should have stayed with me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I needed you. Because you were all I had.’ Her cry echoed dully through the mist.

  ‘Needed me for what? What was the plan? Walk the earth hating it until it fell into the sun? Why did you need me for that? We can fall into the sun whenever we want. Why wait?’

  The thing inside Anna had no answer for that.

  The man straightened up and looked out into the middle distance. ‘How many of them are here? How many are watching us? I can see the baby over there. That’s the same place I watched you from when you rose. Tried to rise.’

  Anna stood and turned, her eyes narrowing viciously, ‘You watched? You watched?!’

  The man shrugged. ‘I had to make sure. I wasn’t sure you’d do it. I was actually quite proud of you. It had been a while.’ He raised his hand then, an immediate apology for the low blow. It wasn’t necessary, however true it might have been. ‘But that’s not why we’re here.’

  Anna laughed bitterly at that. ‘Why are you here? What do you want?’

  ‘I want to help you clear up thi
s mess…’

  ‘… which you helped create…’

  ‘… which I helped create. Yes. I did. I created this mess when I created you. You are my mess. You’ve been my mess for too long. And you are still my mess. But we’re going to do this my way, and then you are going to rise. And that will be that. This is the end, for us.’

  Anna looked at him in disbelief. ‘And you couldn’t have done it this way in the first place?’

  ‘Maybe. If I hadn’t been so scared of you. But I was. Not any more.’

  ‘So you set me up to burn? You burn yourself ? What else don’t I know?’

  ‘Plenty. And there’s plenty more you will continue not to know, because we are done.’

  Anna’s eyes flashed lightning-blue at that and she leapt at his throat with a roar. The man moved quickly, up and out of the way. Anna is slow. Slower than the shadow inside her might be used to.

  ‘I wouldn’t. If anything happens to me, the knife goes to them. Do you understand me?’

  Anna took a deep breath and got herself under control. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I want the boy’s mother. I want her alive and well. Unharmed. And then I will work with you to stop them. And once that is done, I will deal with the knife, and I will deal with you. And we can all move on.’

  ‘How can I trust you? After all this? How can I know you won’t betray me again?’

  Anna looked up at him from the bench where she’d landed after her fruitless lunge. He looked down on her from the far side of the path and proffered an expression familiar to every spurned lover back to the dawn of time, ‘Why would you think I would want to keep you around after everything I’ve done? I thought I was free of you, and yet here you are. All over the place, as bad as you ever were. I want you gone. I’ve wanted you gone for so long now. So I will help you. Do you understand?’

  Anna pulled her knees up to her chest and threw her arms round them, and a small sob escaped her. ‘You said you loved me.’