The Servants
Page 16
Past, also, the skateboarding area, but though he looped around it for a while, in big, slow arcs, he did not stop. He didn’t feel any strong urge to join the other kids flying and falling there, though he did watch their feet for tips. On the way out onto the next section, he flipped the board beneath him, just once. He didn’t need a ramp to do this anymore, and found it hard to remember why he’d once found it difficult.
Sometimes things do change, and that’s okay. You go from one place to another, become different from what you were. Sometimes things stopping did make sense. Ends meant new beginnings.
And he was good with his feet, after all.
“I know you said you have to make up for lost time,” said a voice, sounding scandalized, “but…both of them?”
Mark smiled to himself. He was standing a little way along from The Witch Ball, in the Lanes, killing time by looking at a window full of hats. The voice carried on in this vein as it got closer, but Mark didn’t think David actually sounded very upset.
He turned to see his stepfather and his mother heading toward him. David was carrying a wrapped picture under each arm. Mark’s mother still walked far more slowly than she used to, but she seemed to be getting a little better every day. David said that within a couple more weeks, a month at the most, she’d be able to walk all the way here from their house, instead of just back. Mark believed him. She was like that.
“Hey,” she said. “How was your day?”
“Good. Didn’t fall off once on the way here.”
“And…”
“It was fine,” Mark said, knowing what she’d really meant. His mother had left him and his dad at The Meeting Place, after the three of them had lunch together, and got a cab into town to meet David. Mark supposed this morning must have been kind of weird for David, though his stepfather had given no indication of this.
David, he was coming to realize, was like that.
They ambled slowly through the twisting alleys, following the old slope of the land through the stores, down toward the seafront. David wandered off for a time, giving Mark a turn to support his mother, to be the person she leaned on for a while. It was this way when they turned the corner that gave the first uninterrupted view of the sea, and Mark felt his mother straighten a little.
“I like it here,” she said.
THEY took a break halfway home, and sat outside a café near the base of the old West Pier just as the light started to turn.
“So,” Mark’s mother said. “What are we eating tonight? You got your heart set on a little of that spring roll action?”
Mark thought about it for a moment.
“Actually,” he said diffidently, feeling as if he was about to suggest that, in some circumstances, down might be higher than up, “I might have had enough Chinese food. Just for a while.”
She looked at him. For a moment, he thought her chin trembled, and her eyes looked a little full, but then she smiled.
“You know?” she said. “You could be right.”
“I’m hearing good things about Mexican, though,” Mark said, as David returned with two coffees and a tea.
His mother rolled her eyes.
“Good God,” she said. “If you two start ganging up on me, I’ve really had it.”
“Not going to happen,” David said.
“In a million years,” Mark agreed.
A little later, as his mother and David sat talking, Mark walked down to the beach and stood looking out at the remnants of the West Pier. It occurred to him that not being able to walk out there anymore at least meant that, broken-down and ruined though it was, it was protected from the land, from people who might do it harm. He thought maybe that was the best you could do with memories, with the ways things had been. You couldn’t expect to actually walk in them again.
Most of the time.
As he watched, starlings flew out toward the end of the pier, arcing inward from all over the seafront to join the ever-shifting cloud of birds that had already swooped up and over and around and back, in constant movement, unpredictable but all together. Still they did this at dusk, even though the pier no longer gave them shelter, and was no longer their home. The flock grew larger and larger, moving like liquid smoke over the water, following some pattern only they—and perhaps not even they—knew, as if they were in the service of something they understood no more than Mark, but just doing what they must. As though they were the shadow of God.
Tomorrow, Mark thought, he might buy a rock cake from The Meeting Place and go visit the old lady downstairs. It had been a few days since he’d stopped by. He was sure everything would be ticking over nicely, but it did no harm to make sure. Some day soon he thought he might even ask David if he wanted to come down there with him, to see something that might surprise him. David had his special tasks too, after all. He had a role in the scheme of things. He also worked for the house.
In the background, Mark heard his mother laugh.
MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH attended Cambridge University where he spent the majority of his time writing and performing comedy with the Cambridge Footlights, which led to two series for the BBC. He is the author of More Tomorrow and Other Stories, Only Forward, Spares, and One of Us. He lives in England.
WWW.MICHAELMARSHALLSMITH.COM