The Dead of Summer
Page 16
‘Anita,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to get help, man. We’ve got to go and get help.’
Like someone had flicked a switch and the world was entirely empty. Just me, just me in the darkness.
It didn’t matter, it didn’t matter, I pulled the knife from my pocket, opened it one last time. And suddenly Kyle was rushing at me with the rock I’d hit Denis with. But in that last second he faltered, and the rock didn’t hit me as hard as it could have done. It scuffed my head and I stumbled backwards. Kyle dived past me and in that instant the cave that had been so cool and wonderful and full of promise, my lovely secret, my present to Kyle, felt all at once a hot and crazy place thick with the smell of Mike and Denis’s blood and Kyle’s disgust. He was leaving me and we would never be together.
So as he passed me I stuck the knife into his neck. Stuck it in right up to its shiny red handle. He fell towards me, onto me, and I collapsed with him in my arms. And just like Susan he looked right into my eyes. As his neck bubbled red and the blood ran onto my hand, he looked right into me. His breathing was ragged, quick and gaspy. As I cradled his head I stared at his eyes and I felt such love, I felt such love. I wasn’t alone any more.
Such a lot of blood. His throat pulsed and gurgled and soon both of us were soaked. I felt whole and strong. Through the thin, wet material of his T-shirt I felt his heart beneath my bloody palm falter trip then stop. And at the moment he left himself he entered me like I was water. Do you know what I mean? Do you understand? He was me, finally, he was mine, and that made me real.
All summer long I had studied every detail of him like I used to do with Susan. His nobbly bony head, the way his left foot turned in slightly when he walked, the freckles on his white white skin, the different textures of his voice. And now all those little bits that made up Kyle, that made him him, were leaving Kyle and becoming part of me. I held him in my arms and I stroked his head until finally, finally his eyes became still and he was mine.
eighteen
I sat with Kyle for ages, his body cold and limp across my lap. And while all those empty eyes gazed down on us I carefully etched the words Denis, Kyle, Anita on the floor with Kyle’s penknife, my grip slipping and sliding over the bloody handle. I have never been back, but I know they are still there, those words. I know we are all still down there.
I never found out what happened to Patrick and Elizabeth. Push says the house has been empty ever since. I didn’t go to Denis’s funeral, though Gloria asked me to. And all through the endless questions from the endless policemen, all through the newspaper stories and the television debates, the how-how-hows, the why-why-whys, the outcry and the revulsion, through the excitement and the boo-hoo-hoos (how they picked Kyle’s bones dry, how they savoured every drop). Through it all: the memory, my sweet treasured memory of the glorious relief of knowing, even briefly, what it felt like to be a whole, real person, to be connected and involved and certain – for the first time ever not frightened and invisible; not a nothing, hungry person anymore.
The days pass like the Thames, steady and inevitable. On my way to the factory I watch the school kids on my bus. They look so similar in their little uniforms, don’t they? Occasionally I’ll see a quiet one, separate from the rest and I’ll wonder about the secrets that he keeps. I think often, always, of Kyle, and I cherish the memory of the two of us that last day, that end-of-summer day, that end-of-everything day when I was thirteen. But over the past few years it’s been getting harder to hold on to, harder to remember.
Nobody doubted me. The police didn’t like Kyle. His teachers didn’t like Kyle. Gloria didn’t even question that it might not be him who had murdered her son. I had the cuts on my head from the rock. It was easy. There were even witnesses who, from the windows of the estate, had seen what had happened in the alley the time Kyle stabbed Mike. I told the police what I’d seen him doing with Patrick and that put the extra doubt in their mind. He was a fucked-up kid. Katie’s disappearance had lingered over No. 33 like dried vomit for a year, so the little shoe in Kyle’s chest at the hide-out, plus the one I said I’d found in the mine sealed the deal. It didn’t matter when I said I’d dropped it in the Thames as I ran to the police. I was a good, quiet girl. I stuck to my story. I had killed Kyle in self-defence. They believed me. They wanted to.
Everybody except you, Doctor Barton.
What was it? Which bit of my story gave me away? Which part of my act failed to convince?
Do you remember that room in New Cross Hospital? That spider plant, yellow-leaved and queasy, those too-close, lime-coloured walls? With the windows open it was too loud, the buses interfering with your tape recorder. Trapped air, trapped heat, trapped light. It smelt of coffee and Dettol, didn’t it? Eventually I talked and talked, said the words that over the years would embed themselves in your mind like metal wire wrapped tight around your brain.
The story of Kyle, the story of Kyle and me.
It was cruel of the police to use your expertise so carelessly, to move you off the case so quickly once your purpose had been served. You told me in that kind and quiet voice of yours that you’d been a child psychiatrist for years. You were there to assess, record, report. Your professional opinion had been sought. But it shocked you still, didn’t it, my tale? Sickened you.
You didn’t believe me.
But if you shared your doubts with the police, they clearly disregarded them. The evidence was stacked, it was such a straightforward if unpleasant case and you were only one of many professionals involved. But anyway, it makes no difference now. Since that day I have been very careful. You have had no cause to worry, to write to me so anxiously over the years. I have kept myself in check. The dial turned up to Freeze.
Until now. Until Malcolm.
He came round the day before yesterday. We sat here and watched a documentary about camels. When he left, he did the thing I’d longed for and been dreading for the past six weeks. At the door he stopped and he leant over and he kissed me. He kissed me right on the lips. And then he legged it down the corridor to his flat and he let himself in as fast as he could.
I can think of nothing but my desire to touch him, Doctor Barton, to stroke his sandy hair, to kiss his serious, slightly down-turned mouth. For him to touch me, too. And the more I want him, the more I think how wonderful it would be when he’s sitting here next to me on my little sofa watching telly, to press my fingers to his neck, to slide a knife between his ribs. How beautiful that would be; how much love I could show him then.
When he kissed me that night, I went and sat in the bottom of my airing cupboard with my arms wrapped tight around my head and I crouched there in the dark for the rest of the night. And I wanted Malcolm to come back, I so wanted him, the one person I could never be alone with again.
Because, for an instant there, in that mine all those years ago, for just one brief second in that dark cold cave when I held Kyle in my arms and felt his blood soak every bit of me; suddenly there in the blackness there was so much light, such a pure, dazzling glare, for a moment there was almost too much light to see.
Help me, Doctor Barton. Can you help me please?
Acknowledgements
Thanks to: my agent Claire Paterson at Janklow & Nesbit and to Susan Watt and her team at HarperCollins.
Thanks also to: the Greenwich History Library, Rachel Pask, Tessa Paul, Ian Elliot, Ben Way, Mat Smith, Craig Glenday, Paul Croughton, Danny Patijn, Will Storr, William Drew and all my lovely colleagues at Arena magazine.
Special thanks to: Alex Cree, Dave Holloway, Justin Quirk and Anna Way.
About the Author
THE DEAD OF SUMMER
Camilla Way lives in London and, when not writing fiction, works as a journalist. This is her first novel.
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How
How high they build hospitals!<
br />
Lighted cliffs, against dawns
Of days people will die on.
I can see one from here.
How cold winter keeps
And long, ignoring
Our need now for kindness.
Spring has got into the wrong year.
How few people are,
Held apart by acres
Of housing, and children
With their shallow violent eyes.
Philip Larkin
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
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A Paperback Original 2007
1
Copyright © Camilla Way 2007
Camilla Way asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN-13: 978 0 00 724172 9
ISBN-10: 0 00 724172 0
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EPub Edition © APRIL 2011 ISBN: 978-0-007-44208-9
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