Voices in the Dark

by Catherine Banner

  As they got out of the car, a man with an umbrella came out of the dark to meet them. ‘Anna?’ he said. ‘Is that you?’

  ‘Bradley,’ she said. Her legs were aching from hours on the road, but he covered the distance between them and put his arms around her and picked up Ashley, who smiled reluctantly. Bradley held Ashley close to him, like a returning soldier reunited with his child. ‘Have you been waiting for long?’ said Anna.

  ‘Not long. I thought you would arrive about now, so I came down to wait for you. I thought you might need help with the cases. Here, let me …’

  He set down Ashley and dragged out a box, making an act of struggling with it as though it was the greatest weight. Ashley laughed at that.

  ‘Leave them,’ said Anna. ‘We can take them up in the morning. You two go ahead. I’ll lock up the car.’

  Bradley gave her a quick glance, then led the way, Ashley carrying the umbrella. She could hear them beyond the lighted door of the building, clattering up the stairs. She put a hand on the dent in the roof of the car, then locked it and turned and followed them. The Rolls-Royce looked like something from the past as she glanced back. It was gleaming under the streetlamps, a car left behind when some romantic age came to an end. She closed the door of the building behind her and started up the stairs. Bicycles were lying tangled in the hallway; old newspapers were stacked up in front of the ground-floor flat. Behind one door, she heard a couple talking. She tried to see these things as the future details of her life, but she was too tired, and they just made her heart ache.

  Bradley was waiting at the door. ‘Come in,’ he said. ‘Anna, you look asleep on your feet. Was it a bad journey?’

  ‘Not so bad; just long.’

  ‘I still can’t believe you drove all the way here in that old Rolls-Royce. I doubted you, didn’t I? Didn’t I say it would collapse somewhere near Birmingham?’

  She smiled. ‘Yes, it’s true. But the car held out. After the first few miles, it stopped complaining, didn’t it, Ash?’

  ‘The engine was just cold, because you hadn’t used it,’ said Ashley. He was at the table already, making a careful sandwich out of an old jar of jam and the end of a loaf of bread. ‘Do you want one, Mam?’ he said.

  She shook her head. The stupor of the road still hung over her, and she stayed where she was by the door. Bradley began searching through the cupboards, muttering about tea and sugar. Anna glanced about. The kitchen window was curtainless and looked out over a grimy glass roof where pigeons slept. Beyond, she could hear the traffic surging. ‘It’s a bachelor’s house,’ said Bradley with an apologetic grin.

  ‘No,’ said Anna.

  ‘Come and sit down. I’ll find you something else to eat.’

  Anna watched him search the cupboards and turn over the unpromising contents of the fridge. The cold fluorescent light made his eyes look puffy. ‘Are you working hard these days?’ she said. ‘You look tired, Bradley.’

  ‘I don’t mind it.’ He threw a few things into a saucepan and lit the gas under it. ‘I always wanted to be a teacher,’ he said to Ashley. ‘Since I was your age. Your mother will tell you.’

  ‘It’s true,’ said Anna. ‘Since we started at school and Bradley learned to write his own name and thought he was a genius.’

  They laughed, but after that, none of them could think of anything to say. Ashley finished his sandwich and sat watching them. ‘It’s kind of you to let us stay, Bradley,’ said Anna.

  ‘Stay as long as you want to.’

  ‘Now that we’re here, we can find somewhere of our own—’

  ‘Really, stay as long as you want. I like having you here; it’s good company.’ Ashley yawned. ‘You’re falling asleep,’ said Bradley. ‘I’ve made up the spare room for you, Ash.’ He pointed through the living room to the farthest door. Anna picked up Ashley and carried him to the spare room.

  Anna and Bradley sat up late that night, and when they were both exhausted, the conversation ran more easily. ‘What will you do here?’ said Bradley eventually. ‘Anna, I’ve been meaning to ask. Will you work in a hotel again?’

  ‘I suppose. It won’t be like it was with Monica, though. I’ll have to ask my mother to look after Ash in the evenings. I was thinking about finding some way to dance again, but you know how it is. He’s only small.’

  Bradley got up to wash the plates. ‘Talking to you, I sometimes think I know nothing about life,’ he said.

  ‘You make me sound like an old woman.’

  Bradley laughed.

  ‘I’ll go and check on Ashley,’ said Anna. ‘He gets these nightmares, and when he wakes up, he wants someone to come and talk to him.’

  ‘What does Ashley have nightmares about?’

  Anna hesitated, then gave him the truthful answer. ‘Not knowing where he is,’ she said. ‘And falling through the world and disappearing.’

  ‘Existential for a six-year-old,’ remarked Bradley.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Anna. ‘I’ll go and check on him.’

  Ashley was lying awake when she opened the door of the spare bedroom. She sat down on his bed and listened to the steady drone of the traffic beyond the glass. ‘Can’t you sleep?’ she said then.

  ‘Mam?’ he said. ‘Do you ever feel like you don’t belong here?’

  ‘Don’t belong where?’

  ‘Here. In London.’

  ‘We have only just arrived. It always feels like that coming to a new place.’

  ‘I don’t mean that. I mean, like you don’t belong in this whole place and you want to get up and leave.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Anna went to close the curtains. One of them was broken and creaked mournfully when she tried to pull it across. ‘Well, what, Ashley?’ she said, turning to face him. ‘It’s two o’clock in the morning; tell me what you mean.’

  ‘Don’t get cross.’

  ‘I’m not cross. I’m sorry. I’m not cross, but I want to know what you mean about not belonging here.’

  ‘Why are you scared, then? If you’re not cross, you’re scared.’

  ‘I’m not scared,’ she said. But she was not certain that was true. ‘It just makes me worried when you talk like this.’

  Ashley picked up the necklace from the table beside him and studied the single jewel. ‘Did he really used to wear this?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Anna. ‘I told you about the bird necklace I used to have when I was a little girl. That jewel was the eagle’s right eye.’

  ‘How did he have it and you have the rest of it before you even met each other?’

  ‘It was just chance,’ said Anna. ‘When you are young and foolish, you think signs like that have to be obeyed. A boy has a necklace and you have the other half of it, and you think it means you are meant to be together.’

  ‘So you weren’t?’ said Ashley.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Meant to be together?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s late – you should be asleep.’

  Ashley clenched his fist around the jewel and closed his eyes. She sat there beside him and waited for him to sleep. She seemed to have sat waiting for Ashley to fall asleep a hundred thousand times in the past years. In the orange half-light of the streetlamps, the room looked strange and lonely. That light illuminated the old boxes piled on top of the wardrobe and glistened on the leaves of the spidery plants and lit up the broken television set in the corner. Anna studied these things without seeing them properly, until Ashley slept. She told herself it was superstition to take the jewel out of his grasp and put it back on the table. But she did it anyway.

  EVENING

  THE SECOND OF JANUARY

  It was another night and another bleak inn, somewhere close to Angel City, when I went on with my own story. The route we were taking had grown more and more circuitous as more of the country was barred to us. The woman and her little boy spoke in whispers and stared bleakly out at the night, then went to sleep side by si
de. Mr Hardy drank his spirits in silence. I began to write, and the words came more easily now, and when they didn’t, I sat and watched Mr Hardy.

  ‘I had a family once,’ he said abruptly. ‘I had a wife and two little boys.’

  I put down the pencil. ‘What happened?’ I said.

  He sighed and said very quietly. ‘We were separated. Years ago. My wife and I had to leave the city, and we left our two boys with a relative. I was a wanted man. There was a price on my head under the old regime. I came very close to being assassinated several times; people were watching the house. We could never have gone back while Lucien was in power.’

  ‘And then what happened?’ I said.

  ‘And then … I don’t know. Things changed. I think I was half mad for a while after my wife died. I changed my name, and I changed my identity, and I pretended I didn’t exist. I mean, I pretended to myself. I made up another life, because my old life had stopped existing. There was no old life to go back to any more. Because one of my sons was gone and the other was grown up, and I didn’t know how … I could not think how I would face him again.’

  He rested his head on his hand. His face was very sad and old in the lamplight of the inn. He had a look about him of someone who had once been happy, a long time ago, and it made me melancholy to think of the years since then that had shadowed over his once-handsome face. ‘But what about you?’ he said. ‘I still don’t know how the story finishes.’ He poured out spirits again. ‘Carry on telling me,’ he said. ‘Please. It would make my heart less heavy to hear you tell me.’

  And I felt so sad on his behalf that I went on with the story.

  SEPTEMBER

  ‘Anselm Andros, you are not concentrating,’ said Sister Theresa. I glanced up and came back to the real world. The rest of the class was staring at me; outside the windows, a fine drizzle was falling.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, sitting up straighter.

  ‘Try to keep your mind on the lesson in progress,’ Sister Theresa told me with a frown.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said again.

  I bent my head over the textbook. I could not remember what the lesson in progress was. They were all the same, lists of facts that half the class copied down studiously and the other half ignored altogether. There were thirty of us left this year and still not enough desks to go round. I was sharing with Gabriel Delacruz. He had divided the desk very precisely with a line of chalk. Michael’s place, beside John Keller, the doctor’s son, was no longer his.

  The restless sounds of the classroom troubled the air as Sister Theresa went on writing. ‘Second year of King Cassius’s reign: Alcyria imposes reparations on Malonia,’ she scrawled on the blackboard. It was history, I decided. Though it could just as well be political studies. I wrote that sentence down, then drifted away from the classroom again. Sister Theresa was describing the breakdown of the national economy, writing figures on the board with a flourish.

  The school clock chimed four, and Sister Theresa set down her chalk and raised the moth-eaten orange flag at the front of the classroom. We pushed back our chairs and stood up for the national anthem. We now had to sing it every day when school finished. As soon as it ended, I threw my jacket around my shoulders and began piling up my books. People were already racing out of the other classrooms, the girls from one side of the school and the boys from the other.

  ‘Anselm, one moment,’ said Sister Theresa. ‘I want to talk to you.’

  I waited. ‘Do you know where Michael Barone is?’ she said. ‘I understood he was coming back to school.’

  ‘His family left the city,’ I said. ‘Last week. They sold their shop, and I don’t know when they are coming back.’ I could not say ‘if’, but we both knew that was what I meant.

  Sister Theresa made a note in her register, frowning, then straightened up and looked at me over her battered spectacles. ‘Tell me, Anselm,’ she said. ‘Why did you choose to stay on this year?’

  I murmured something vague about wanting to be well educated.

  ‘On some points you are a very good pupil,’ she said. ‘But you have been in another world since the start of term.’

  ‘Sorry, Sister.’

  ‘I don’t want you to lose your way,’ she said. ‘These are difficult times.’

  She meant the boys in the class who had joined the Imperial Order; I knew it. There were three or four, and though none of us had betrayed them, everyone knew who they were. ‘My family are royalists,’ I said. ‘They have been royalists since my father’s father, and I’d rather die—’

  ‘Would you?’ she said. ‘Yes, that’s what I was afraid of. Concentrate on your studies and you will do well, Anselm.’

  I opened my mouth to question her, but I did not know what to say. She began cleaning the chalk off the board.

  ‘You may go now,’ she said.

  I picked up my books and left, along the corridor and across the desert wasteland of the front yard. The mud here was packed hard enough to jar your feet; here and there, the younger boys had excavated holes with bits of stick, then given up. I was the last to arrive at Jasmine’s school, though I ran half the way there. All the way, I was wondering what Sister Theresa had meant.

  Jasmine was waiting outside the gates, sitting alone under an elderly tree that grew up through the pavement. She was frowning at something on the ground in front of her, and as I approached, my skin turned cold. She was making the stones creep across the ground. They edged over the dusty paving of the street, as though they were racing each other, and fell through the grating of the basement opposite. I heard the soft plinking sound as they struck the bars. A crow with a broken wing leaped from the tree, and Jasmine looked up. ‘Anselm, you’re late,’ she said.

  ‘Is that a new trick?’ I asked.

  ‘Uncle taught me, before. Anselm, you’re late like you always used to be.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I won’t be this year. It was just today; I couldn’t help it.’

  She rolled her eyes with an old weariness and picked up her books.

  ‘Sorry, Jasmine,’ I said. ‘My teacher was lecturing me; I could not get away.’

  ‘What what she lecturing you about?’

  ‘Not paying attention. And not losing my way.’

  ‘Losing your way? What does that mean?’

  ‘I wish I knew. Come on.’

  We set out for home. Our route was the straightest possible; it crossed a patch of waste ground where broken glass clinked under our feet, then came out across the new square. Carriages swept past us on their way north and south, and I kept hold of Jasmine’s hand as we crossed it. At the centre was a statue of the king, and a few traders had broken away from the market and set up at its feet, spreading their goods out on old rugs and rickety tables. Their shouts rose around us, and people argued and picked up the goods restlessly and swore at the traders when they did not like the prices. I stopped at my grandmother’s stall to buy vegetables and bread for dinner.

  ‘Why doesn’t Jasmine come up and say hello?’ she enquired as she counted out shillings for change.

  ‘Oh, you know – she’s only small, and the crowds.’

  ‘That’s as may be,’ said my grandmother. She glanced over at Jasmine and frowned. ‘And where is that friend of yours today?’

  ‘Who, Michael?’ I said. She knew him well, but she always called him ‘that friend of yours’. ‘He has left,’ I said. ‘He left last week.’

  ‘Oh?’ she said. ‘Yes, I noticed the shop standing empty. His father was a pawnbroker, wasn’t he?’

  I did not answer. The crowds divided us, and I struggled back to where Jasmine was waiting and took her hand. A light rain was beginning. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s go home.’

  Jasmine was gazing up at the statue of the king, and she did not hear me. The white stone was streaked with mildew now, and people had attacked the inscription underneath until it was barely legible. THE CORONATION OF HIS HIGHNESS KING CASSIUS III, it read. JUSTICE, INTEGRITY, PEACE. And someone had
added words below it.

  ‘Anselm, what does that end part say?’ Jasmine asked, pointing. ‘Lying … bas … lying bastard? Is that what it says?’

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Jasmine, hell itself will break loose if Grandmama hears you shouting “lying bastard”.’

  She laughed and followed me. We ducked under the old barbed wire onto St. Stephen’s Lane. This street was half demolished; the slum housing was supposed to have been rebuilt years ago.

  ‘I don’t like school,’ remarked Jasmine, balancing along a ruined wall.

  ‘It’s only been one day, Jas. Why don’t you like it?’

  ‘Because of my teacher. Stupid Mr Victoire. I can already tell I don’t like him; he’s just like horrible Mrs Simmonds last year.’

  ‘How can you know already?’

  ‘He made me sit in the cupboard. There are spiders in there. I felt them crawling in my hair; I swear I did. He said I needed to learn discipline. I know discipline. I just don’t listen to him when he tells me to do something stupid.’

  ‘He made you sit in the cupboard?’ I demanded.

  ‘Yes. That’s not one word of a lie.’

  ‘Wait – come back and tell me properly,’ I said, trying to catch hold of her arm, but she jumped onto an abandoned newspaper stand, then swung round a lamppost, and I could not catch her. ‘I’m the queen of all I survey!’ she proclaimed from halfway up the lamppost.

  ‘You look more like a monkey to me,’ I said, and made her laugh and slide down to the ground. ‘But seriously, Jasmine,’ I said, catching her arm. ‘He made you sit in the cupboard? That doesn’t seem right.’

  ‘It’s not so bad,’ said Jasmine. ‘I like it better in the cupboard, because I don’t have to see his ugly face. Will you carry me home? Listen, let’s pretend I’m a princess and you’re my servant.’

  I picked up Jasmine and ran with her. ‘Faster, servant!’ she shouted at intervals as we made our ungainly voyage over the rubble at the end of the street and through the next alley to the end of Trader’s Row. As we raced along the street, Jasmine reached up to catch hold of the flags that were still hanging from the washing lines. They were left there from the end of July, mingled with the washing on the lines. It was the tradition to leave them until the end of September, when the king had formed the first government.