84k

by Claire North

  “You deaf? We guard them.”

  Theo hesitated, then dismounted, let the woman take the bike by the handlebars, handed over his mobile phone and wallet. The woman pointed up a flagstone alley towards a low run of grey concrete buildings. “Cumali. She’s in there, with the faders and the ones who bite. Try not to make a ruckus, yeah?”

  Theo nodded and followed the line of her finger.

  At his back, he thought he heard her whisper, murmurs to the faint white stain against the clouds where the moon huddled. Blessed is the moonlight through the cage blessed are those who weave and those who break blessed is the mother as she walks upon the mountain stone blessed is …

  There was a concrete patio in front of the long, low concrete building with a metal roof where Dani lived. A few cracked plastic pots contained the remnants of grey shrubs and the occasional burst of yellow-petalled marigolds. Someone had made the effort of sweeping the leaves from the nearby trees into a corner, but hadn’t had anything else to do with them, so slowly they blew back in tidelines. A privet hedge ran between the frosted-glass front doors of each apartment block. Very few lights burned. A generator grumbled somewhere behind low walls, scenting the air with diesel.

  Theo found Dani’s door by the light cast from the tower block opposite it. A long glass window was dark on the ground floor; a flag hung across showed a faded image of a giraffe in yellow and orange, walking away from a setting sun, head turned towards the earth.

  One light shone dull on the first floor, glowing from a cracked-open window, the head of the lamp tilted back into the illuminated room. An arm moved across the light, casting a tentacle shadow over a wall, before flickering back down to darkness. Theo knocked on the front door, inaudibly. He knocked a little louder, and instantly felt afraid, looked around, wondering who’d been woken by the sound. Nothing moved, no shadows stirred. He reached out to try again, and a flicker of light caught his eye. The light vanished. A moment later it appeared again, a square of blue-white within the biting grip of the privet hedge. A mobile phone, confused by its present condition, pressing against the net of twigs that supported it, slipping steadily downwards. The motion of its slow descent through the hedge was setting off a sensor, waking and sleeping the screen. He could see the hollow it had already carved, torn leaves and snapped wood. It looked like it had landed in the hedge with some force. It looked like it hadn’t been there for very long. He hesitated, then reached in. The screen was locked, the greasy journey a dirty thumb took across it clearly visible. He turned it over, glanced up and round and wondered if this was a test, couldn’t fathom what kind, put the phone in his pocket and, moving now a little faster, feeling his heart tap-dance a head-spinning rush, pushed on the front door, testing it.

  It opened on the latch, only a little pressure needed. He stepped inside, a smell of sticky dry beer, damp laundry and cigarette smoke on the air. Once the place had held a family, two parents, two kids, three at a squeeze. Now every room had been subdivided, padlocks put across the doors, nine people to a toilet. People liked to claim it was where the scroungers went, the traitors who couldn’t get a job and had lived off the charity of the state, before the Company had moved in and sorted things out, businesslike, making sure people who didn’t try couldn’t get.

  No one admitted that the enclaves held the bin men, cleaners, waiters, janitors, porters, shelf-stackers, carers who wiped the old women’s bums, bus drivers and health assistants too skint to afford anywhere else. Everyone has to make a choice, the Company said. You have to choose success.

  From the back of the building a lilt of guitar, played by a woman singing to herself, a glow of candlelight from beneath her door. From a door to the left the low grey buzz of a TV, playing through the night to the sleeping couple tangled in each other’s limbs across the rustled mattress. Theo felt his way up the stairs, carpet giving way to lino, squeaking like an arthritic rat beneath his feet. A light beneath the door on the first floor, from which a woman’s voice, hushed, spoke on a phone. He approached slowly, knocked once, barely brushing the painted chipboard with his knuckles. No answer, but the door was not locked or bolted, and the woman’s voice continued, so he pushed it open.

  The woman inside was tall, unusually so, with short yellow hair cut to a soft fall one side of her face.She wore a black T-shirt, black jeans and a pair of red wellington boots. Her arms were gently toned from light exercise, her neck was long and unadorned, her eyes were grey, her lips were pale, she held a mobile phone pressed against her ear and a 9mm pistol in her other hand, a silencer on the end. A light freckling of blood stained her face and bare skin, and probably her clothes, though Theo wasn’t sure. A larger stain of blood and brain matter covered the wall behind the loosely made single bed in the centre of the room, still warm, still seeping down. A pair of feet stuck out from behind the bed, on the side away from the door. They were bare. They could have belonged to anyone. They belonged to Dani.

  He couldn’t see her face.

  He couldn’t imagine there was much of her face to see.

  A little mass of matter, grey brain, shards of white bone, brilliant crimson blood, no bigger than a pinball, went schloop and detached itself by its own weight from where it had stuck to the wall, splatted onto the bedside table. The wardrobe, its door hanging by one hinge, was open. There was a bloody handprint on the handle. Clothes had been torn from their hangers and lay across the floor. A syringe, empty, sat on the sheets, small with a tiny needle point. A laptop stood open, the screen bright blue and welcoming.

  The woman with the gun smiled at Theo in the door, a flicker of recognition not of familiarity, but of an awkward situation in need of a little resolution

  tilted the gun a little, not threatening

  requesting a moment of patience while she finished her conversation on the phone, so sorry, terribly rude, if you don’t mind just holding on a moment …?

  She said, “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yes. That’s right.” She spelled out a postcode one letter at a time, “Sierra, echo … yes, echo …”

  Theo stood in the door, the light from a single bedside lamp skimming across his feet and knees before fading into shadow behind him.

  “Homicide. Yes, that’s right. Yes, I am the killer. No, you’re my first call. Yes, I can wait. What do you estimate as being your response time? That’s fine. Thank you. Of course I can hold. Thanks.”

  This done, she turned the phone to one side, pressed it so the mouthpiece was buried in her shoulder, tilted her head the other way and, smiling at Theo, added, “So sorry—the police are on their way. Now if you just make like a heron, I can be with you in a mo.”

  Theo stands in the door, and wonders what a heron would make like. One leg high, one leg in the water, frozen in the act of catching a fish.

  The woman went back to the phone. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yes, two to the head, two to the chest. No witnesses but someone has just … Oh …”

  Theo walked away.

  Three women wait by the entrance to the estate

  one holds his bike, his mobile phone, wallet

  “That was quick,” she says.

  “Dani is dead,” he replied, taking his bike.

  “You kill her?” A flicker of anger, but it’s deep, beneath the resignation, expectation. This was what happened.

  “No. The killer is still in there. She’s just called the police.”

  “Fuck. Mum’s gonna kill me if the cops wake her tonight.”

  “Thank you for looking after my bike.”

  “The cops, for real?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Dani’s dead? Oh this is just the total fucking …”

  Theo on his bike, pedalling into the night.

  There are the streets

  this is the city

  these are the darknesses that seemed to threaten but turned out to be merely void, a place where

  this is what brain sounds like as a bit of it peels away from the wall, schlooop, and drops, splat, onto a carpeted floor. I
f the floor was not carpeted it might have sounded different and if anyone bothers to clean it then they’ll probably use a vacuum cleaner, something specially designed to get at the dried bits basically it’s like cleaning meat but really you need a new carpet and

  this is the man called Theo, riding away, at the centre of the universe

  these are the times when the night is

  these are the words that

  bang! Who’d have thought that the gun wasn’t loaded with blanks after all and splat down he goes breathing breathing not breathing any more it’s not your fault you know that it’s not your fault that

  this is the day Dani realised that dreams were for children

  the news when the government announced that corporations ran things so much better than civil servants and it’d be better for everyone if the MPs focused on important things like

  like

  well, whatever was left when the teachers, doctors and judges were gone

  this is the dream where Theo still dreams of his father dying, though he wasn’t there, he never saw all he has is imagination of the prison and the end

  This is Theo, at three o’clock in the morning, cycling home from a murder scene, wondering why he doesn’t cry.

  This is Theo, at three o’clock in the morning, lying awake on a canal boat pointing north, and behind the curtain that keeps him separate from his host, a stranger who has made him tea and asked no questions, and now he puts his hands over his face to hide his eyes, and in silence cries like the summer rain.

  Chapter 18

  When the boy who would be Theo was six months away from finishing A levels his agricultural studies teacher said:

  “You know you could really make something of yourself you could indeed you could you could do accountancy for Budgetfood! Or work in the logistics division or the management department you could be a real player, a real player in the world of microwave meal distribution you could even run for corporate councillor if you worked hard, kept your nose to the grindstone like this you could have a lovely house with three bedrooms and two bathrooms, two bathrooms now that’s something to look forward to that’s something!”

  And three days later his maths teacher said:

  “Get out. Get out while you can. You are young. You still have a chance to live. You can still be free. I know your dad was … but that’s not who you are, you don’t have to be … you have a talent you could get out just get out and be …”

  Sitting on the beach with Dani Cumali, staring at the water as it dragged at the shingle, a bit of stained dark sand visible beneath, a sound like the clattering of crab’s claws across a skull as the ocean rolled, he said:

  “I was thinking of applying for university.”

  And Dani looked at him, and blurted, “That’s the most fucking stupid thing I’ve ever heard. Do you seriously think they’d have you? I mean look at you, where are you gonna get the cash? Where are you gonna get the references—what the fuck do you think you’d do with yourself, you can’t get out there isn’t any way out there isn’t …”

  And then she stopped, and looked at the sea, and knew that no amount of washing could flush away the stench of fish intestine, stomach, heart, eye, head, skin and scale from her skin, and that the maggots as they dropped into the collection bags beneath the nets would go to eat the wounds of rich men in places far, far away, and that her contract would not be renewed and that dreams were for children and she was a grown-up now. Grown-ups just dealt with things. They carried on—that’s what being grown-up meant. She wrapped her arms around the boy who would be Theo and said:

  “You should do it. I think it sounds great. I wish I was coming with you.”

  And he held her tight, and they watched the sea.

  He wasn’t surprised to find the man sitting in his mum’s favourite chair. Mum always hated Jacob Pritchard, said he was a bad influence, a bad, bad influence it was his fault that …

  But her benefits had been stopped because she was fit for work (though no one would hire her) and if no one would hire her in Shawford she just had to look elsewhere (there was nowhere to go) but somehow they’d kept going, paid the gas, paid the electric and will you look …

  … there’s Jacob Prichard now, rolling his mum’s favourite glass bauble between his ringed fingers, a swan with cloudy blue pigment in its base. They say that once a Dutchman bringing petrol over the Channel tried to double-cross him, and his feet washed up in Lowestoft.

  “So,” he mused, as Theo put his school bag down and sat silent in the chair opposite him. “I hear you wanna go make something better of yourself. Mate of mine said Oxford was the business, but if you wanna go somewhere with fewer wankers I won’t stop you. Your choice, boy. Your choice.”

  The day after the boy’s eighteenth birthday, there was a bank deposit in his favour.

  His dad had always kept his mouth shut about the job that landed him in the nick, and though Jacob Pritchard wasn’t involved in that sort of thing, not theft, especially not those little blue pills for the

  well, you know

  he respected a man who knew not to grass.

  Respect was important to men. One day, when Mike’s boy was all grown up, he’d understand that too.

  Dani saw him onto the train to London, a transfer for Oxford in his pocket.

  She didn’t stay on the platform once he boarded; there was this new guy she was going to watch TV with, but she felt it was important to be there, to say goodbye, tell him his face was stupid, absolutely refuse to cry.

  He emailed, of course, in the first few weeks.

  Told her about college, classes, some of the people he’d met. The boy in the room next to his was called Theo Miller, and was unbelievably posh, but also kinda nice, like, a nice kid just a bit … you know …

  Dani replied sometimes. She’d met this guy, he was good, it was good. Her apprenticeship was ending; she was hoping to be bumped up on to a full-time contract or at least a fixed-term or maybe even just a six-month contract, out of the fish department into something better like packaging.

  After a while his emails became less regular as the work piled up.

  She stopped replying.

  She was not offered a contract in packaging.

  three-month fixed-term contract fourteen hours a week as a cleaning colleague 5 p.m.–7 p.m.

  She supplemented her income working the local café 8 a.m.—4 p.m., and that sort of saw her through a bit. And this one time she went to this class down the local church hall where they were making jewellery from recycled stuff from the beach like these pebbles but also washed-up glass and bits of plastic and metal and things and she thought she’d like to do that, as a hobby maybe. But finding the time was really tough because they met at 7.30 p.m. and sometimes she didn’t finish work until 7.10 and then they did these spot-check searches on employees leaving the building and that could take twenty minutes and so by the time she got to the hall it was all finishing anyway and …

  If Theo noticed that she was no longer replying to his emails, when they came

  rarely when they came

  he didn’t say anything.

  He told her that he was thinking of joining the rowing club, but that actually maybe he wasn’t right for it after all. The guys who did that sort of thing, they’d done it a lot before and he hadn’t—though he could handle a boat all right, but they didn’t seem to think that would be enough; he didn’t have the attitude.

  The attitude, you see the attitude was …

  and Theo

  the real Theo Miller, the boy in the room next door, laughed and said:

  “Fuck them! Fuck them. Come on, you know I’m right! Fuck them all. Let’s have gin.”

  And maybe he’d underestimated his neighbour after all, and he was all right deep down.

  Chapter 19

  On the canal Neila said, “Oh, so you’ve done some sailing before.”

  Theo replied, “I grew up by the sea. I mean we didn’t do much, my dad ran th
is local youth club, mostly football but also sailing sometimes, although mostly it was money laundering. Mostly … that. I think he liked the kids, though. He coached the under-11s. They did well and …”

  For a while they sat on the back of the barge, Neila watching as Theo guided it round the lazy bends towards Marsworth Locks. After much consideration, they had removed the blood-soaked padding that pressed across his side, and for the first time Theo had seen the stitching she’d done and stared a long while before finally murmuring, a little green around the cheeks,

  “Is that … cornflower blue?”

  Her eyes flickered from the thread that held his side together to the embroidery on the wall, and she swallowed. “Yes. Well, it’s what you have to hand, isn’t it?”

  At Marsworth they moored for the night opposite the water pump, and Neila turned the handle but no water came, just the chunk chunk chunk of air and ice deep within the iron, and she declared, “No showers, I think. Not for a little while.”

  They ate sliced bread with jam and margarine, and Theo sat at the back of the boat wearing his oversized stranger’s woollen coat over his grey bloodstained jumper, and two pairs of socks and long johns beneath his tracksuit bottoms. He stank, but so did she, and after a while you just got used to these things.

  And when the sun rose they began to climb through the locks, heading east where the canal branched, and she opened and closed the gates and he sat with one hand on the rudder on a little wooden stool and waited for her command and it was …

  … all things considered …

  easier with two than it was with one, and she couldn’t remember the last time she had cleared Marsworth so quickly.

  The Hector sailed for Northampton.

  Time on the water is

  Neila would argue that it is the purest time which obeys only the laws of nature.

  Dawn dusk

  Winter summer

  It is the time that must be taken to do the thing that needs to be done. It is not a time for

  meetings conference calls texting email commuting running late jogging committing failing counting seconds until