She and her daughters weren't quite out of earshot down the newly cobbled alley opposite when the smaller of the two blonde girls remarked "His drawings weren't very good, were they, mummy?"
"At least he's trying to earn himself a little cash, Felicity, and he isn't taking any younger person's job."
"He mustn't have any children of his own to look after him," the older girl said.
"He hasn't got anyone to make faces for," her sister agreed, as a group of chattering Japanese tourists put paid to the sight of the two children skipping along hand in hand with their mother. He was gazing after them as if doing so might bring them back when the chalk drawing on the flagstone between his splayed legs began to turn red.
Nobody else saw. The tourists and students above him were ignoring him except to avoid his drawing, as though nobody existed below the level of their stomachs. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then his reddened hand on the side of his boot, and dug in the rucksack lolling beside him for a pocket mirror, which he held in the palm of his hand and raised in front of his face.
He'd have said that was an old man if he'd stepped out of its way in the street: shaggy faded hair, eyes cracked by seeing too much, caved-in cheeks dragged down by weeks of stubble. Only the mouth could do with being more collapsed. He dabbed at a last trickle of blood with the sleeve of his raincoat and ran his tongue over his aching gums, then he lifted his top lip and twitched the lower. No wonder the little girls hadn't been impressed: the glimpse of the remaining teeth in his lower right jaw spoiled the effect. He'd had enough of the rabbit—there were better things he could do with his face. He dropped the mirror in the rucksack and saw a woman watching him from the doorway of a souvenir shop.
Weren't pavement artists supposed to use mirrors? She was looking at him as though wondering how much of a criminal he might be—as though she knew he'd stolen the chalk from a shop across town. As soon as she withdrew to deal with a customer, he grabbed the rucksack and the very few coins that had been dropped for him, and lurched painfully to his feet, treading on the telltale drop of blood that had fallen on the curly yellow hair of the child trying to sleep on the cloud. He pivoted his heel and felt the child vanish like dust—felt himself grinding the stone thin underfoot, thin enough to give way beneath him, revealing the secrets it hid.
He wasn't really feeling that, he had too much control. He lifted his foot and saw that the child's face had become a pale blur smeared with dark red. He'd never seen anything like that elsewhere, and there was no reason why it should affect him. He shoved his meagre pickings into a trouser pocket and thrust his arms through the straps of the rucksack, and put some crowd between him and the erased child.
Now that he was on the move he was better than unobtrusive. Nobody wanted to spare him more than half a glance, especially once he set about rooting in waste bins. He found himself three newspapers and clamped them under his arm while he searched for somewhere he wouldn't be overlooked while he read them. He was out of the bustling streets and on the far side of a ring road that smelled of several lanes of hot traffic when he chanced on a park.
Several people as decrepit as he hoped he looked were asleep on the grass under a blue sky with a white sun carved out of it, others were drinking and even talking on benches. Eventually he located a bench with nobody on it or near, facing a lake that contained ducks and litter, and within earshot of a children's play area. He sat on someone's spray-painted initials and unfolded a newspaper, and sang to himself whenever he heard a child cry or scream. He was turning the pages of the second newspaper when a headline and a photograph turned off the sights and sounds of the park in his head.
CONTROVERSY MOUNTS OVER SALE OF MURDER SITES. Of the five houses in the areas of London where the bodies of children murdered by builder Hector Woollie had been discovered, four were still for sale despite protests from the families of victims. Leslie Ames, owner of the site of Woollie's final crime, had now withdrawn the property from the market and was living there with her thirteen-year-old son. A photograph showed the house with a for sale sign outside. "Not for sale," the caption said.
The words went away, and there was only the photograph that might have been the house itself, reduced to handy pocket size and stripped of everything—colour, surroundings, occupants—irrelevant to the memories it held. He caressed it with his fingertips and resumed singing the lullaby the cries from the play area had urged out of him.
"Now I lay you down to sleep,
Close your eyes good night..."
It had almost been perfect that time. The medicine had done its job. He only wished he'd realised sooner what else it was capable of besides keeping his employees' minds normal or at least in check. The little girl hadn't struggled at all once he'd given her the pills he'd said were sweets: there had been no clenched fists, no mouth grimacing for air, no toothmarks on the underside of the pillow, just a trace of saliva that had faded as he'd watched. As he'd wheeled her in the pushchair to the van, the pillow behind her head, an old couple out for a stroll had smiled at the sight of a child peacefully asleep. That was the image he'd brought away with him—that and the memory of the concrete, white and smooth as a sheet drawn over a slumbering face.
Even if she'd wakened before the sheet had covered her, he was sure she hadn't panicked. Though she'd managed to poke a finger out of the earth, there had been no sign of a struggle, no upheaval of soil. It must have felt like a dream to her, he thought, if she had even been aware of groping through more than darkness. He'd spread earth over the finger with the side of his boot and trodden it down, promising himself that next time, if there had to be a next time, he would double the number of pills.
"Angels come your soul to keep,
Close your eyes good night..."
He was having to sing more loudly, because the sounds of the park had started to get to him. A little girl was being dragged away from the lake where her toy boat had lodged on litter in the middle, and screaming louder as her older sister swiped at her head with the back of a hand. He bit into his raw gums so as not to imagine the kind of home the girls came from, the lives they led. The world was full of children who deserved to be given some peace, but there was nothing he could do about that now. If Terence and Hughie hadn't seen the flaw in his workmanship before he'd had time to put it right—if he'd found a way to deal with them before they'd told anyone else... He hid the lullaby under his breath while he used his longest fingernail to cut out the photograph, which he slipped into his shirt pocket. He dumped the papers in an overflowing concrete bin as he made himself only stroll out of the park.
Having just felt helpless in the case of one child, he was anxious to avoid them. He mustn't risk intervening, not yet, not until he didn't know when. Whenever he heard a child in distress, any number of them in the increasingly uncared-for streets, he sang to himself. In less than an hour he was free of the city and tramping along a devious road toward distant woods that were hauling the sun down, and the only squeals he heard weren't of children but of pigs. Very infrequently he met people out for an evening walk, and ranted at them well after they were past him. "How's your feet? Don't want to swap them for mine, do you? Any idea where I can get some new ones? Maybe some doctor would give me a transplant. They can do anything these days, the doctors. It's a good old world, never been a better...." There was nothing like pestering strangers to make them want to forget you, nothing like playing the madman to conceal how sane you were—no trick like drawing attention to yourself to convince people you had nothing to hide. But he was going to have to hide while he finished changing his appearance, and when he came to the edge of the woods he left the road.
At least he was certain nobody was looking for him. He'd swum underwater to the pier while all the attention had been on Terence in the boat; he'd moved toward the shore when nobody was watching, so that by the time the coast guard began searching for him, he'd been able to stand on the ocean bottom and cling to one of the pier's supports, only his h
ead above water, disguised by a clump of seaweed. Once it was dark he'd made his way along the water's edge until there were only screaming birds to see him emerge. On an otherwise deserted stretch of promenade, he'd found a drunken tramp asleep on a bench in a shelter, only his right arm in the raincoat he must have struggled to pull off because of the heat, and had relieved the man of it. He'd spent the night feeling the salt dry on him in a hollow on some wasteland, having pulled bricks out of the earth to make himself something like comfortable. By the time shops started opening nearby on the edge of town, his clothes had been sufficiently dry, and sufficiently concealed by the long raincoat, for him to risk buying a new outfit and a rucksack in a charity shop. An incinerator on a rubbish tip had taken care of his old clothes once he'd changed in a public convenience, and then he'd been well on the way to becoming his new public self.
Tonight would see it finished. Though he seemed to be alone in the woods, he followed the gravelled waymarked path until he was miles from the road and the twilight started filling in the cracks in all the trees around him. He sat on a grassy hillock facing a fallen tree, having planted two large stones to brace his heels against. Even if nobody could be looking for him, he wanted to be certain nobody thought they saw him. He fished out of the rucksack the pliers he'd snatched from a do-it-yourself shop and clamped them to the outermost of his remaining lower teeth. As he bore down on the pliers with both hands he began to sing, soon more indistinctly and higher and higher. When he wasn't able to keep up the gurgling lullaby he did his best to laugh.
EIGHT
When Ian came home from school he could tell that his mother had got ready to say something serious to him. What she said, however, was "Do you want to help me shop?"
He hated that—her making him wait to find out which of the things he'd done she was going to bring up. He hadn't been caught smoking since they'd moved back to the house; he hadn't skipped detention either, and the couple of stupid detentions he'd been given for nothing at all had been short enough that he'd arrived home before her. He'd hung around with Shaun and Stu and Baz nearly every night, but he knew she was hoping he would grow out of them if she didn't go on about them. Maybe the subject she was holding back might even turn out to be interesting, if that wasn't too much to expect. "All right," he mumbled, though it was more of a wish.
On the way to the supermarket, she only asked him boring stuff, what kind of a day he'd had at school and whether he'd thought any more about what he wanted to do with his life. Two women gossipping across the gate of a front garden with a Victorian streetlamp in it fell silent before resuming their chat, and he knew they recognised him and his mother from all the publicity—knew that was why his mother raised her voice just slightly to suggest he ought to work toward staying at school after he was sixteen so as to qualify for a better job. The games adults played with one another bored him even more than most of the stuff they talked about, and why should they expect him to grow out of anything when they never grew out of those? His answers were growing shorter until they hardly emerged at all, though he didn't particularly want to make her feel bad: it was just that since his father had found himself another family to live with, and for quite a while leading up to that, Ian had kept experiencing the sensation that a slab had been laid on top of his mind, a weight as dark and heavy as it was insubstantial. Thoughts could lift it if it didn't squash them into pointlessness, but more often he needed something outside himself to free him of it—right now, swinging a supermarket trolley up the ramp and driving it at the automatic doors to see if they were fast enough to get out of his way. It might have been more interesting if they hadn't, but they did.
He was following his mother out of Frugo twenty minutes later—minutes that had felt slowed down by hushed thin music and the pace of all the trolleys, not to mention how half the customers had seemed not to want to be noticed watching him and his mother—when an orange-uniformed assistant some years older than he was and with a good deal more acne to show for it accosted him. "Where you prowling off with that, mate?"
"Just to unload it at home," Ian's mother said. "We'll bring it straight back."
"The other boy lets us," Ian said.
The assistant ignored him. "Where's your house?"
"Just in Jericho Close."
"Jericho Close."
"That's what she said. What's your problem?"
"I've got none with most of it."
"Don't have one with our house either," Ian said. "It's our house."
Delight not too unlike contempt dawned on the assistant's face. "Thought you were them. The manager won't want you taking that there."
"Think we're going to bring a body back in it?"
"Shut that, saying bollocks like that. You're as bad as—"
"Forget it, Ian. Leave it now. Excuse me," Ian's mother said, and stepped between the assistant and the trolley. "We'll do without. We can manage."
Ian grabbed the two heaviest carrier bags and pretended they needed no effort while the assistant was watching. By the time the five-minute walk home had lasted ten minutes, the increasingly flimsy handles were cutting into his fingers. He did his best not to let his mother see the trouble he was having, but when at last the kitchen table took the weight she caught his hands and turned them over to wince at them, then kissed them. "I'm sorry I made you do that," she said.
He only looked at her, which made her say "I wonder what you'd think of a notion I've had."
"Don't know."
"If you aren't in favour no pretending, promise?" She waited for him to shrug before she began loading the refrigerator. "How do you think you might feel about having somebody else in the house?"
"Who?"
"Nobody just yet. Only it struck me we've a bedroom going spare and I wanted to know what you'd say to the idea of a lodger."
"Don't know."
"Just the idea. Nobody's going to be moving in unless we both approve of them. Do you want time to think about it? You could tell me tomorrow when you come home from Hilene's, or whenever you decide. I don't want to put pressure on you about it."
"You're not."
"I wouldn't advertise it round here. I thought of putting a notice in my and Melinda's window."
"Go on then."
"You think?" Much more neutrally she said "Will you be telling your father?"
"Don't you want me to?"
"Up to you," she said, and saw that he wasn't convinced. "Let's see if it happens and then he can know, do you think?"
"If you want."
"It doesn't always have to be what I want," she said, so wistfully that he was preparing to mumble "It isn't" when a car door slammed outside the house.
His mother one shut the freezer, which emitted a frosty breath, and ducked into the front room to glance through the window. "Must have heard us," she amused herself by saying. "Here they are."
Here was another one of the games his parents played, she meant or ought to mean. He wasn't going to ask who had turned up with his father. He stayed in the kitchen and fed himself a drink of sharp sour grapefruit juice from the carton while she waited for the bell to ring before opening the door and straightening her mouth to greet his father, who responded by throwing his head back an inch and pushing the upper lip of his broad square face over the lower. All this performed, Ian's mother said "He isn't quite ready. He's been helping me shop."
"They're good at that when they don't have to dig in their own pockets, aren't they?" Ian's father seemed to wish he hadn't said that, because he added hurriedly "We're early, I expect. Whenever you're set, big feller."
Perhaps Ian's mother didn't like being talked past, because she drew almost imperceptibly aside. "Will Charlotte come in for a glass of something?"
"I think she's best left in the car if we don't want hysterics."
"That must be hard on you," Ian's mother said with, he suspected, as much delight as sympathy. "What sort of crisis do eight-year-olds have these days?"
"Anything can turn
into a drama. There's no knowing what until the curtain's up." He hesitated before saying "Don't let it bother you, but she got herself into rather a state on the way about coming here."
"I'm sorry to hear it. About what?"
"Well, obviously, about..." He waved at the kitchen. "You won't be too much longer, will you, Ian? We'll both end up with a headache if her highness decides to create."
"I'm surprised you told her at her age," Ian's mother said.
"I can promise you we didn't, but unfortunately she overheard Hilene reading some of your press coverage."
"Hilene can be rather audible, can't she? Are you waiting to be invited in?"
"I'd better stay where Charlotte can see me, otherwise her siren's liable to go off."
"That would never do. You might want to consider putting on a spurt, Ian, before anyone gets the impression I won't let your father in the house."
Ian dumped his drained glass in the sink and went upstairs to grab his shoulder bag, into which he threw his toothbrush and deodorant and skin soap and hairbrush and another pair of the jeans he was wearing and a Drilled Skulls T-shirt followed, to placate his mother, by socks and underpants for the morning. All that should be enough for an overnight stay, but he wasn't going to let anybody think he'd rushed because of Charlotte, and so he stalked to his window.
She was in the front passenger seat of the Peugeot, squandering the leg room he needed a lot more than she did. She'd drawn up her knees in a long dress like a tube of floral wallpaper, to wrap her arms around them, and was pressing her small, slightly pudgy face against the window, her breath swelling on the glass as though she were trapped beneath it. She was keeping a proprietary gaze on Ian's father, which made Ian bare his teeth just as she glanced up at him and showed him most of her tongue.
He'd shoved the window open, intending to yell one of the words she wasn't supposed to hear or know, when he realised what he'd done. Pushed that high, the sash always stuck. "Dad," he called, "can you fix this?"
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