by Sanjida Kay
At first, it wasn’t difficult to follow him. He walked along the main road with a couple of other boys, on the opposite side from her. The traffic, as usual for this time of day, was heavy and they crawled along. But, at a roundabout, Levi took a right and when she followed, the road cleared. She pulled over, waiting for him to catch up and pass them, hoping that in the poor light, he wouldn’t notice them sitting in a parked car across the street from him.
‘Mum! What are you doing?’ hissed Autumn.
And then Levi turned towards them. He skipped across the road, waving at the boys he’d been walking with. He ran right in front of the car. Autumn instinctively ducked down and faced away. Laura froze, staring straight ahead. Levi darted between her car and the one in front and jogged down a side road. He was heading towards Montpelier, where they lived. Laura wondered if he knew someone there. Of course, he could still weave through the side streets towards Cheltenham Road and go elsewhere, she thought.
She waited a couple of minutes and then eased the car into the road and down the side street. Levi was in the distance, his twin shadows caused by the street lamps splayed out across the kerb.
‘We’re following him?’ hissed Autumn. ‘Mum, are you, like, totally insane?’
‘Shush. Just watch him. See where he goes.’
Levi was no longer jogging, or walking with his former gangsta gait. He pulled himself erect, easing his rucksack over both shoulders. Before he reached the bottom of the street, he veered right and disappeared into the darkness.
‘Where did he go? Can you see him?’
Laura drove a little faster. Forgetting to check her mirrors, she slammed on the brakes near where she’d last seen Levi. The car behind screeched to a halt and the driver blared his horn.
‘Shit.’
She was about to pull over when she saw it: a tiny path running between the ends of the gardens, its entrance overgrown with ivy.
‘Where does it go?’
Autumn shrugged.
Laura tried to take the next right, but the street had been blocked off to car drivers and she had to stop sharply. The driver behind honked his horn again. She backed up and swung the car around, heading the way they’d come. She turned left onto the road they’d originally parked on, and then took the first left. Just as she turned, they saw Levi, crossing the road in front of them. He started walking down the street opposite – a one-way street.
Laura swore and drove down the next road. To her consternation, instead of running parallel, the street curved and started to dip downhill. Laura took the first right, up a steep hill. She’d lost him.
But he was there, walking straight towards them. Laura was forced to drive past the boy. In the wing mirror she saw him open a gate and enter a garden.
‘Which house is it? Look now and see which one it is.’
Autumn pulled the seat belt away from herself and knelt up to look out of the window. ‘Got it,’ she said.
At the top of the road, Laura turned left and parked the car.
‘Do you want to come with me or would you rather wait here?’
‘You don’t know which house he went in to,’ said Autumn sulkily.
‘Well, you can tell me – or show me and then I’ll take you back to the car. I’m sure the last thing you want to do is see Levi again.’
‘It’s okay,’ mumbled Autumn, climbing out of her seat.
They walked back down the street until Autumn stopped.
‘You’re certain it was this one?’
Her daughter nodded. It was a tall, thin terraced house, similar to their own, but there the similarities ended. The gate that Levi had walked through was ajar, stuck fast on an uneven paving slab. The front garden was waist-high in brambles, a tangled mass that almost engulfed the path; thick, thorny stems arced out of the briar. The house had once been rendered with cream cement; in the vapid light of the street lamps, it seemed grey and was fissured with cracks. Parts of the exterior were coming away or had fallen off, to reveal uneven brickwork. The front door was streaked with mould and the paint had bubbled and peeled away. A greenish slime ran down the wall above the door all the way from a crack in the gutter on the roof, which was missing some tiles. The only light came from the window on the ground floor and they could see that the woodwork was splintered and rotting; the pane did not fit properly and a gap was clearly visible.
‘Do you think this is his friend’s house?’ said Laura. She realized she was whispering.
Laura carefully stepped around the open gate and walked slowly towards the house, dodging the bramble tendrils. Autumn quickly followed her. When they were a few feet away, half hidden by the dense undergrowth, she peered into the front room. The curtains were hung haphazardly and didn’t quite close. A desk lamp on the floor was lit. There was a sun-bleached sofa and a dining room chair piled high with school books. Balanced on the top was a plate, a fork and a glass, all unwashed. The TV was on in the corner, with the sound turned down.
In the centre of the room stood Levi. He had dumped his bag by the door and was wearing a tracksuit. He was moving gracefully, almost methodically, backwards and forwards and turning in a half circle. It was as if he was dancing in slow motion. She didn’t know what he was doing – and then it came to her: he was practising Taekwondo.
There was something dreadfully wrong. She could feel it in her bones. There were no other lights on in the house. Even the door into the room he was in led into an unlit hallway. There was no sound, nor smells of cooking. She had a horrible thought: that this really was Levi’s house, the one he lived in with his mother. And simultaneously, she had another smaller, nastier thought: now she could not, in all conscience, go inside and confront his mother, and for that, she was grateful. She felt sickened by herself, by her cowardice. She turned back towards Autumn, who was staring wide-eyed at the boy, spinning and circling and kicking an invisible assailant with stealthy grace in the dilapidated house. The two of them crept down the path and onto the pavement.
‘I’m sorry, love, but there’s one more thing we have to do,’ Laura said when they were in the car.
Laura didn’t know the address, but she’d dropped Jacob off once. He lived in Cotham, a genteelly fashionable suburb where professional couples and students were interspersed with independent film companies, edit suites and graphic design offices. Because of the traffic, it took much longer than she’d expected to reach his neighbourhood, and then she couldn’t find his street. Swearing under her breath, she drove around for a few minutes, until she spotted it – wide, residential, but with a launderette-cum-café on the corner. Laura parked behind Jacob’s Land Rover and, leaving Autumn in the car, walked across the small paved front yard, past a rose bush in a glazed blue pot. She was struck again by the incongruity of Jacob’s flat. His basement bedsit was once a well-to-do person’s parlour in a three-storey Georgian house; there were stone roses above the bay windows and the plaster cornice’s were intricately patterned overlapping ferns. Now this beautiful, spacious room was cluttered by a bed, a sofa, a coffee-table, its surface covered with a stack of horticultural text books, empty beer bottles, and coffee mugs; an exercise ball looked as if it were escaping, and a pile of pads and boxing gloves were heaped haphazardly in one corner.
Her hands were clammy and her heart was beating irregularly. She wiped her palms on her jeans and knocked. When Jacob answered, he was still in his BMF kit: camouflage trousers and a blue vest. He crossed his arms and the muscles in his biceps bulged.
‘You were right. I didn’t tell you the truth,’ she said.
‘What do you want?’
‘Levi cornered her. He tore up her—’
‘I don’t want your excuses.’ He took a step back and seized the door as if to slam it in her face.
‘I lost my temper!’ she shouted.
Jacob paused.
‘I know it won’t change
your mind, about me, or working together, or, or anything, but I wanted you to know the truth. What really happened. For the sake of our friendship.’
‘Go on,’ he said grudgingly and folded his arms again.
‘Well…’ She took a deep breath. She couldn’t say she’d felt threatened; a little intimidated but not seriously threatened. It hadn’t been self-defence. She hadn’t been protecting her daughter. ‘I pushed him. I wanted to hurt him.’ She swallowed uncomfortably and felt the blush start to flame in her cheeks and rise towards her hairline. ‘I pushed him and he fell. He hit his head on a stone and cut his cheek.’
Jacob’s expression was unreadable. They stood staring at each other. Her face was burning. Eventually Jacob nodded, curtly. He shut the door.
Laura turned and walked back to the car. She and Autumn drove to Wolferton Place in silence. What had she expected, she wondered – absolution? Forgiveness? At least she’d told him. At least she’d finally been honest about what had really happened and how she’d felt.
AUTUMN
Autumn lay in the bath and shivered, in spite of the heat. Her mum was mad, following Levi. Suppose he’d seen them? She cringed in shame and her cheeks burnt.
And then she thought about where he lived and what they’d seen. It didn’t make sense. Levi had always seemed so… she couldn’t quite put it into words… He was always neatly dressed, his hair in even corn rows, his shirts clean and ironed, his skin shone. He wasn’t one of those kids who looked like a nerd, or who came to school with their trousers too short because they’d suddenly grown an inch overnight and there wasn’t enough money for a new school uniform. He looked cool, in control. Powerful.
Without consciously thinking about it, she ran her fingers through her shorn hair. She thought of all the horrible things he’d done. The slugs. The name-calling. Pointing out her scuffed, beat-up shoes, laughing at her unfashionable skirt that she hadn’t even realized wasn’t fashionable and the jumper her mum had shrunk in the wash so her bony wrists stuck out. Her tortured bike. Her paintings. The message scrawled on their house. The humiliation. The isolation. The fear.
And none of that matched the image she had of him now, rotating and pivoting, as fluid as a dancer, in that broken-down house in a cold and lonely room. It made her feel uncomfortable. Sorry for him. And she couldn’t feel sorry for him. She hated him. He was hateful. She remembered the texts. Way beyond your shit shoes, your emo hair – the pure, unadulterated violence of them. And the Facebook page. Her cheeks flared scarlet again, even thinking about it, and she slid beneath the surface of the water.
She felt the pressure of all those messages building up, clamouring, crawling, seething through the Internet and scuttling across the page. Like insects, buzzing and vibrating with skittish hate. She’d left her mobile in the car on purpose and then her mum had found it and kept it as evidence. But she wanted to look at Facebook again, to see if Levi and all the others were still posting messages. And the thing she couldn’t even bring herself to think about or tell anyone about. The most shameful thing of all.
Is it still there too?
Could her mum have seen it? What if she had to return to school? What if her mum couldn’t keep her home or couldn’t find a new school for her to go to and she had to go back? And face all of it. All over again.
She poured a large glug of bubble bath into the water and swished it about with her hands until it frothed. Her mum had said she’d got the Internet running again. She’d search for her phone tonight, she thought, after her mum was in bed, and take a look at Facebook. Just to see. Just to check.
LAURA
There was one message on the answerphone. Laura waited until Autumn was in the bath before she played it. She sat on the bottom stair in the hall. It began to rain, a few drops pattering against the window and then a deluge. It was so loud, she had to play the message twice.
It was from a woman with a thick Bristolian accent but her tone, rather than sounding warm, was that of a petty official, her speech peppered with unnecessary jargon. She said she was from Social Services.
‘Myself and a colleague will be with you on Monday twelfth of November at 10.30 a.m. If that is not convenient, please call the office on the aforementioned number to rearrange our appointment.’
She wrote down the phone number, along with the time they would be coming on a pad by the phone. She pressed delete. She couldn’t – she wouldn’t – send Autumn back to school on Monday. She hadn’t heard back from Mr George, so Autumn would be with her when Social Services arrived, which would not look good. And presumably this woman and her colleague would know about the court case. The interviews with the children – the witnesses to her crime – might even have been completed.
* * *
The rain beat against the skylight window in the attic. She’d loved the sound as a child: a reminder that she was back home after months in the Namibian desert. But now the noise no longer made her feel safe. She took deep breaths and tried to count them, but after two or three, her breathing sped up and she started thinking about Levi again, how he was terrorizing her daughter in such a calculated way. And yet she couldn’t shake the image of him, alone in that run-down house, barely half a mile away from where they lived.
Unable to sleep, she rose to make herself a cup of tea. As she wrapped her dressing gown around her, she heard a sound. She wasn’t sure what it was but after the previous night, she assumed the worst. She opened the bedroom door and listened. The house was still and silent around her. She tiptoed to the landing window but she could see little. The rain had eased and the clouds were beginning to clear. The noise had come from outside, she was sure. Perhaps it was Aaron, back to graffiti more Emily Dickinson on their house. That it had been Aaron – in spite of what Jacob had said – she was sure. She decided to phone the police immediately – and check on Autumn.
It was as she was walking downstairs that she heard a different noise. It was one so familiar that, for a moment, it was oddly comforting and then completely chilling. She stood motionless on the stairs, unable to believe what she’d just heard.
It was the back door opening.
The house was in darkness and she was standing at the top of it, the staircase spiralling downwards below her. She was wearing a thin white nightgown with a towelling bath robe. Her feet were bare. It was her lack of shoes that upset her more than her semi-nakedness: you couldn’t run fast on soft Western soles. She had nothing she could use as a weapon. Her daughter was sleeping one floor below her. And someone had just broken into the kitchen.
It had to be Aaron.
As quickly as she could, Laura started down the stairs. She kept to the wall in case Aaron emerged from the kitchen and looked up and saw her through the banisters. Her instinct was to run to Autumn’s bedroom. She forced herself to be careful, to tread gently so that the stairs wouldn’t creak and give her away. She shouldn’t jump to conclusions, she thought, trying to think logically. She didn’t know for certain that it was Aaron – it could be a burglar. And if it was, it was better that he took what he wanted and left. Accidents happen when criminals are disturbed and feel trapped. Or find out that there is only a woman and a child alone in the house.
She was shaking by the time she reached the corner of the first flight. One more set of stairs and she would be on the same floor as Autumn. It was quiet below her. She wondered if she’d imagined the noise. It could have been her neighbour, or a fox knocking into a bin. She could feel a chill draught against the back of her neck from the landing window. She took another step and the wooden stair gave a shrill groan.
There was the unmistakable sound of someone moving about downstairs. Laura’s heart started to race. She took the next few stairs quickly. As she reached the bottom, there was a much louder noise, a kind of squeak and a muffled thud, as if he or she were opening a cupboard in the kitchen or bumping into the chairs. So it was a burglar. Aaron wouldn’t
be looking through her cupboards. There was nothing of any worth in there, she thought. It wouldn’t take whoever it was long to work that out. Her bike – and the mangled remains of Autumn’s – were in the dining room, the TV and DVD player were in the sitting room. There was nothing valuable in the rest of the house – but then a burglar wouldn’t know that.
At that moment, as she was poised on the bottom stair before the landing leading to Autumn’s bedroom, the door swung open. Autumn stood in the entrance to her room, looking sleepy and confused, wearing her rose-patterned pyjamas. Laura froze, frightened that Autumn would come running towards her or speak. She held a finger to her lips and motioned for her to return to her bedroom. Autumn didn’t move, but Laura saw the sleepiness vanish. She looked terrified.
She glanced over the banisters but she could see no movement in the stairwell or the hall. She darted across the landing, the elderly floorboards protesting. Autumn remained rigidly in place. Laura almost pushed her out of the way. Inside her bedroom, Laura held the handle down as far as it would go and slowly closed the door, then let the handle rise, millimetre by millimetre, until the door was soundlessly but firmly shut.
She turned to Autumn and hugged her tightly.
‘Is it a burglar? Will he hurt us?’ Autumn’s voice was rising.
Laura put her hand over her daughter’s mouth. She held her fast. Autumn was trembling. She could feel her ribs, the ridges of her spine. She tried to think, but her mind was blank. It was as if part of her brain was missing.
She needed to phone the police but her mobile was plugged in to charge in the kitchen. There were two handsets in the house – one of them she’d left lying around somewhere – either the hall or the kitchen. Why couldn’t she be the sort of person to put them back? She’d been using the one in her office so hopefully she’d left it there. But to get to it she’d have to cross the landing and go down a flight of stairs, where she’d be in the open if the man or men came up. They might hear her. She couldn’t risk leaving Autumn on her own in her bedroom, but if she brought Autumn with her, the two of them would make even more noise.
