by Baker, John
That’s all. Nothing else. The occasional knocking from the boot, or not so occasional as it was now, constant thumping in fact, she had to ignore.
Marilyn couldn’t ignore it, though she wasn’t going to open the boot to see what was in there. Are you kidding? She remembered the fairy stories about people who opened the forbidden box. In one the box was filled with deadly diseases that immediately flew out and attacked her and the rest of the world. In another, when the girl opened the box, she became old and died and fell to dust because it had been three hundred years since her love had given her the box.
So, no, she would not open the boot of the car whatever happened. But that didn’t stop her wondering what was in there. It was something alive, an animal perhaps, or even a human being. Or maybe it wasn’t alive but something mechanical, a robot or an engine. But if it was something as obvious as that why had Danny warned her against taking a look? What could be the harm in seeing a robot, or a cat?
She fixed her eyes on the road and tried to put the sound of the thumping out of her mind. Marilyn knew how psychology could lead you astray. As soon as you start to think of what it might be in the boot, you have a desire to open it. She knew that she was capable of talking herself into opening the boot, she would convince herself that Danny actually wanted her to open the boot and that the injunction not to open it was a perverse way of telling her she had to.
The mind isn’t always on our side.
It can lead us home and it can lead us astray.
It wasn’t an engine, nothing mechanical. If it had been something inanimate like that there would have been a pattern to the thumping, a rhythm. But there was no pattern. First there was a kind of frantic kicking sound, then silence. A little later there would be a loud bang, then a series of smaller ones. From time to time there would appear to be a pattern, a solid and regular beat like the drums behind a rock song or the insistent tapping of a code, but just when Marilyn had convinced herself of the regularity it would fall quiet again or the banging would increase in tempo dramatically, turning into a scuffling sound.
Marilyn made up a story. In the story she was travelling from York to Whitby in Diamond Danny Mann’s car and there was a constant racket coming from the boot which Danny had told her to ignore. She wasn’t, under any circumstances, to open the boot.
But in the story Marilyn stopped the car and pulled off the road at Boggle Hole. She got out of the car and went around the rear. The thumping was wild, it was as if the boot was packed with wild animals struggling for freedom. She grasped the handle and pulled it open.
Inside there was nothing. There was no interior flooring, no spare-wheel. Nothing. And there was complete silence. She looked up at the sky and the moors around her and there was a vast emptiness, not a bird or a cloud, no whistling of the wind or the hum of traffic on the country road.
When she blinked and looked again into the boot there was no car. There was only Marilyn alone in the universe. The sound in the boot would never return, the car would not be seen again and Diamond Danny Mann would have disappeared into the fastness of space.
There would be no past and no future, no pain and no joy. There would be Marilyn Eccles and an endless empty landscape.
But it was only a story.
As she approached Boggle Hole Marilyn wondered if she would be able to stop herself making the story come true. She played with the idea that because she had invented the story then she would be captured by it, forced to play it out within the parameters she had allowed it.
And the thing, whatever it was in the back of the car, it was as if it knew the story too, and as Boggle Hole loomed into view the banging and thumping in the rear of the vehicle rose to a tumult of sound. Not just impact sounds now, there was breath in there as well, small cries like the whimpering of a child.
38
Alice Richardson looked at her daughter. Hannah was at the school gate with her skirt hitched up, chewing gum and practising flashing her black eyes. She’s a tart already and only ten years old, said a voice in Alice’s head. It was the voice of Hannah’s Irish grandmother, Alice’s mother, dead now for five years but still as garrulous as ever. Alice would never be able to shut her up. The gates of Heaven weren’t thick enough to keep out all that gossip, composed as it was of magic, gassy, blathering prose.
Dominic was over by the tennis courts head to head with Rafiq and Lauren, all of them laughing uproariously at the latest dirty joke.
‘Where’s Conn?’ Alice asked.
‘Dunno,’ said Hannah. ‘Haven’t seen him since this morning.’
‘You don’t keep an eye on him, then? Your little brother?’
‘Oh, Mam,’ Hannah said, glancing round to check if anyone had heard. It seemed to Alice that her children could be severely embarrassed by the fact that she drew breath. Hannah had reached the stage where she wouldn’t go out with the family unless there was no alternative. Never to the cinema or the theatre and only to a restaurant if there was a wedding or a wake in the family. Unless it was McDonald’s, of course, but it never was because Alice refused to eat in a place where they threw the plates away after every customer.
Alice spoke to a couple of the other mothers about the floods while Hannah continued to preen herself and show off her pre-pubescent body to the world. When Hannah had been growing in her womb Alice had spent the whole nine months bonding with her. Since then she had spent another ten years perfecting the bond. So nearly eleven years, all in all, and here she was watching someone who was a stranger. During the same period, Alex, Alice’s husband and Hannah’s father, had spent his time bonding with himself and a few cronies down at the pub and his relationship with Hannah was really no worse than Alice’s. Alice sometimes felt that everything going on around her might have meaning. It was simply a matter of cracking the code.
‘You seen Conn?’ she asked Dominic and Rafiq as they passed by on the road, Lauren in a sandwich between them.
‘I saw him this morning,’ Dominic said.
‘I haven’t seen him, no, Mrs Richardson,’ Rafiq said.
Lauren smiled through her eye-shadow and sucked her lip ring.
When everyone else had gone Alice marched over to the school office, only to find it closed. ‘He must’ve gone home by himself,’ Hannah said. ‘We can’t stand here all day. I’m cold.’
They walked back towards the river. Hannah trudging along in her wellingtons, unable to pick her feet up in spite of her mother’s nagging.
In the streets sloping down to the river the hexagonal STOP signs were almost totally submerged by river water. It was as if they were floating there instead of being fixed on the top of three-metre posts.
I’m not going to worry about this, Alice told herself. Hannah was right. Conn had walked home alone. He knew Alice would worry when he wasn’t there, at the school gate, but knowing that had not stopped him. Well, I’m not going to give him the satisfaction, Alice told herself crossly.
Nevertheless, she found herself walking faster than usual and by the time she entered their street Hannah was fifteen or twenty paces behind her. She waded through the flood waters and stepped over the sandbags at the front door. Alex was standing halfway up the stairs.
‘Is Conn here?’ she asked.
‘No. I thought you were picking them up.’
‘Conn wasn’t there. I thought he’d be here.’
‘Don’t worry. He’ll be on his way.’
‘I am worried,’ Alice said. ‘He always waits for me.’ Hannah came through the front door. She walked up the stairs without speaking, squeezing past her father.
Alice followed her and Alex came last. ‘What happened this morning?’ Alice asked her husband. ‘You left them both at the school gate as normal?’
Hannah and Alex exchanged a glance.
‘You did, didn’t you?’
‘Not exactly at the gate, no. I haven’t done that for a while now.’
‘Not exactly at the gate,’ Alice said, hearing her voice
grow shrill, unable to keep it down. ‘Then where exactly is it you leave my children in the morning?’
‘I leave them at the bus stop,’ Alex said. ‘They’re not babies. There’s loads of kids there at that time. He’d be straight to the school with Hannah.’
Alice turned to her daughter. ‘You went straight to school?’
‘Yes.’
‘And Conn?’
‘He follows behind,’ Hannah said. ‘I was talking to Rachel and Sarah. But he was tagging along.’
‘You saw him go into school?’
Hannah played with a wisp of her hair.
‘You saw him go into school, Hannah?’
Hannah opened her mouth and closed it again. She shook her head from side to side.
Alice sat down heavily on the arm of the couch. Alex reached for his coat. ‘I’ll go and find him,’ he said. ‘He can’t be far away.’ She listened to his footsteps on the stairs. She heard the door close as he pulled it to behind him. Hannah turned away and went to her room.
Alice let herself fall from the arm of the couch on to the cushion. She splayed her legs in front of her and searched the cracks on the ceiling. This was the place she’d never let her imagination visit. From time to time with each of her children she’d come to the brink of this place and always managed to pull back, knowing that if she gave it space in her head there might be a corresponding space in the world.
This was one of those times that happened to other people. Unfortunate people. People quite unlike Alice and her family. It was a statistically untenable event. The chance of its happening to her was so remote that it was impossible. If someone somewhere in England was going to snatch a child today, the odds against it being her own child were enormous. Astronomical. It couldn’t happen.
And it hadn’t happened; Alice tried to bully her own mind into submission. It hasn’t happened, she told herself. There are alternative explanations. Alex will be back in a few minutes and Conn will be with him.
But she watched those few minutes click past on the digital display on the front of the VCR and not one of them brought a grain of hope. Everything was thrown into immediate relief. The beating of her heart slowed like a clock which was winding down. The blood pumping through her veins was as if poisoned by cholesterol, it clogged rather than flowed, threatening to form curds of thrombi which would burst the vessels in her heart and head.
Alice looked at the room in which she lived through a darkening tunnel as her eyes glazed over and her mind fought the unacceptable reality which had swooped down from a relatively cloudless sky.
She thought she was dying. She believed that her vital systems were closing down, even in some way that she was complicit in this act of suicide. That the prospect of living the rest of her life without her youngest child was too much to bear. It was as if the organization of her being was split asunder, her soul and spirit flying off in fear and dread and her abandoned physical body falling into an inspiration of torpor and decay.
The alarm bell rang for a long time before she heard it. At first it was intermittent like the bell at the start and end of a round of boxing. It triggered hazy, colourless images of bruised and glistening flesh as two heavyweights in silk shorts swung at each other’s heads. The bell transformed itself into a continuous cacophony and the image in her head repeated the same few frames over and over again. A lightning fist from the shoulder connecting with and splitting an area of flesh above an eye, blood and pus spraying out in an arc like a crimson rainbow.
For an instant the bell was a single, modulated scream, tearing the vocal cords of Conn as fear and incomprehension ripped through the tenderness of his form. Alice felt her own body tilt towards spasm as she imagined the abandoned shrieking of her son.
‘Mum,’ Hannah said, handing her the telephone. ‘Are you deaf? It’s been ringing for ages.’
Alice took the phone and put it to her ear. Her hand was shaking. She didn’t want news. If it was the worst news she didn’t know how she would cope with it. Rather, she knew that she wouldn’t cope at all. She didn’t want Hannah to see her mother implode, to see her disintegrate while listening to a voice on the telephone. ‘Hello,’ she said. Her own voice seemed as though it came from elsewhere in the room. It was as if her various body parts and organs were distributed in the spaces around her. There was little cohesion to the Alice she’d thought herself to be. Her skin no longer seemed to contain her. ‘Mrs Richardson?’
‘Yes.’
‘My name’s Bonner. I’m an associate of Sam Turner.’
‘Sam,’ Alice said. ‘Is he there? Can I speak to him?’
‘No, he’s not here at the moment,’ the voice said. Croaky, hesitant. ‘It’s about your son.’
‘Yes?’ Alice’s voice was a whisper, her eyes wide open. ‘Sam wants you to go to his house. You know where that is?’ The man said something else but his voice faded as an obstruction in the airways gobbled up his words. ‘What?’ Alice said. ‘What did you say?’
‘Do you know where Sam lives?’
‘Yes, I heard that. I know where he lives, but you said something else.’
‘There’s nothing to worry about.’
‘Is Conn all right?’
‘I’m sure he is, but Sam will explain. You’re to go there right away.’
There was a click as the party at the other end switched off his mobile. ‘Wait,’ Alice said. ‘Is Conn there? Is he with Sam? What is this all about?’
The dialling tone in her ear. She looked at the phone and put it back in its cradle. She got her coat and slipped her boots on and walked towards the stairs. She turned back for an instant to talk to her daughter. ‘I’m going out.’
‘Where?’ Hannah said. ‘What’ll I tell Dad?’
‘I’ll be at Sam’s house.’
‘Sam’s house?’
‘Sam Turner. Conn’s all right. He’s with Sam.’
39
The only positive thing you could say about the house was that it was clean and tidy. The magician didn’t think much of the area. Densely populated by socio-economic class IV and V whites, net curtains everywhere, young, very young women with babies. Everyone in the street wearing trainers. There were a group of youths standing outside a video shop when Danny arrived and it had been as if someone had tapped each of them on the shoulder simultaneously. A silence fell and they turned as one to watch his approach. Danny kept going, didn’t flinch. He could see the idea of a mugging forming in one or two of their brains but his charisma kept him safe.
Sam Turner’s terraced house was at the quiet end of the street. It had a fresh coat of paint and the magician let himself in through the front door. He shook his head at the simplicity of it. His opponent was a private detective who had, apparently, never heard of a three-lever lock.
Apart from a small kitchen area the ground floor contained a table and three chairs, off in one corner was a desk with the other chair from the dining set, and a couple of easy chairs in front of a small wood-burning stove. One wall was shelved with books and videos and CDs, and a small CD player was standing at the back of the desk. The telephone was hanging on the wall next to a black and white portrait of a laughing young woman. Probably the man’s latest partner.
There were some papers on the desk but the magician collected all of these together and placed them in a drawer. He put his bag on the chair by the desk. He took out a length of green nylon rope and his shining bayonet. He removed a new face-cloth and a roll of masking tape and placed all of these articles on the desk.
He hyperventilated for a while, squatting on the floor and taking short shallow breaths, then, leaving the bayonet where it was, he took the rope, the face-cloth and the masking tape upstairs and placed them neatly on Sam Turner’s bedside table next to a paperback novel by Henning Mankell. The bed was unmade and on the floor were a discarded T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts. The magician curled his upper lip in distaste.
Shortly after he rang the woman called Alice Richardson there
was a knock on the door. Danny stood behind the curtain and looked out of the window. There was a big man standing on the pavement. Flamboyant. Black leather trousers and shoes and in the gap between the two a pair of sky-blue socks. When the man turned to look up and down the street Danny could see that he was wearing a black silk shirt. He had a shark’s tooth set in a gold cap on a chain around his neck. Over the shirt he wore a brown suede jacket with a belt.
The magician froze. He watched the man while he knocked again. The shark’s tooth was a talisman of some kind. Danny didn’t know what its exact significance was. The man might not know himself, he looked like a yob, but you never could tell. No one knew better than Danny Mann that things were not always what they seemed.
The man came over to the window and Danny stepped back behind the curtain. He watched the man shade his eyes and push his face close up to the glass, squinting to see through to the interior of the house. He could be a friend of Sam Turner’s, Danny thought, or someone he worked with. But there was something about the man’s body language, his sense of purpose, which gave Danny the impression that he was as much of a stranger to Sam Turner’s house as Danny was himself.
A debt collector, maybe? That seemed closer to the mark, some heavy sent over by a loan-shark to collect on Sam Turner’s debts. The magician smiled in spite of himself; the correspondence between a loan-shark and the shark’s tooth that was dangling around the man’s neck seemed momentarily ludicrous. But the world was filled with weird correspondences. Acts of magic were performed on a daily basis by people who had no knowledge whatsoever. A shark’s tooth, whatever talis-manic properties it possessed, would work as well for a loan-shark as for an initiated wizard. A schoolboy who purposefully wore odd socks to bring himself good luck and to protect himself from evil was putting himself into contact with the spiritual world in exactly the same way that a shaman or a priest does. Professionals did it with a degree of consciousness and wisdom, but the world of magic was open to all-comers. Anyone who sought esoteric or occult secrets would not be ignored by the beings who inhabited those worlds.