He put on his old clothes, to be less conspicuous. He took a box of matches from the kitchen. He could buy petrol if he needed it. It was a pity to leave all his clothes, but he could buy more; his purse was in his pocket. He threw his keys on the bed. He wouldn’t need them again.
He strode across the reservation and into a side street, toward Mulgrave Street.
Most of the windows in the terrace were full of planks or doors, like an infection. A few houses had resisted; cars stood outside. Trees were stuck in the pavements; a decaying handbag hung from a branch, a bicycle tyre drooped from another. A rag-and-bone man passed him, wheeling a cart, with a thick, wailing, incomprehensible shout. In one of the occupied houses a broken window was backed with a piece of cardboard; EGGS, it said in the frame of jagged glass. The cart clattered away. The man shouted thickly at the houses.
Chris emerged onto Mulgrave Street. The deep blue sky fell open; around him white clouds lay tangled on the horizon, like convoluted bones. The sunlight accumulated on the back of his neck; for a moment the landscape stirred restlessly. He gazed along Mulgrave Street, at its crossroads on the waste. St. Joseph’s School stood alone, surrounded by railings. A master was gesturing ranks of boys into the school. Chris knew his face.
It was the man who’d grabbed him the day he had come here with the Vale School Players. His hands clawed at themselves. If only he could lure that man to the house! A black cat with ragged plastered fur fled past, glancing fearfully aside at him. Never mind: his rage would do for Clare, if she dared come near the house. It was her fault he had killed his grandmother. He would enjoy taking revenge for that, as he had on that dog for the death of his cat.
None of the streets toward the school was Amberley. He walked toward Upper Parliament Street. Lamp standards stooped long concrete necks over the roadway; trees sprouted from the rubbly pavements of levelled side streets. Beyond a corrugated tin wall a mechanical shovel howled and spewed bricks. A lorry laden with spades and pickaxes stood outside the wall.
The pull felt less urgent, too generalized for him to locate. He neared a terrace. This must be it: but it wasn’t. A lone postbox said WACK and FUCK. It must be the next terrace—that was the only one left standing. He stumbled off the pavement, which was cracked like ice, onto the waste. The wooden bone of an armchair showed through its torn plastic skin.
The terrace wasn’t Amberley Street. He gazed at the tin that filled the windows, bewildered. Beyond the houses a doll whose cracked mouth was stuffed with mud sat in a pram without wheels. Beyond that he saw a single house, its yard walls still intact. A streetlamp stood outside; there was even a street plaque on the house wall. He began to run. AMBERLEY STREET. Hot dust puffed out beneath his sandals.
It was a grey three-storey house. The windows were full of shattered holes, but curtains panted feebly within, colourless as vegetation trapped beneath stone. One sash was almost blind with boards; beneath its glass a curtain stirred. Small attic windows hung with grey curtains stood forward from the slate roof.
The front yard was cramped close to the house. Tufts of grass and weeds sprouted through a scattering of glass and slate. The basement windows were nearly buried; the brows of their sashes stood emptily above the surface of the yard.
Three steps led up to the front door, which was dull brown, partly charred and blistered. The flap of the letter slot hung askew beside a large rusty doorknob. As he approached, Chris glanced at the adjoining set of steps. Above them an intact front door was displayed in a jagged frame of brick. Beyond it a hall with flowered wallpaper led out onto rubbly waste.
He took hold of the doorknob, which felt like a stone rolled in grit, and went into the house.
The hall seemed hung thickly with dust; most of that was the light. Great damp stains bulged the dim wallpaper; one pregnant swelling was covered with pale green patches, like ancient bread.
He moved stealthily along the hall. On his right a closed door led to the room with the almost-boarded window. A floorboard began to shift beneath him, but he redistributed his weight before it creaked. Above his head the posts of the banister faded into colourless vagueness. Someone was moving up there. He crept along the hall, though he hardly needed to: now he was in the house he need fear nobody.
In the wall beneath the stairs he found a door. He turned the knob, which squealed reluctantly, and tugged. The door had clearly not been opened for a long time. Its wood bulged from the doorframe; its moist lock was scaly with rust.
He thrust one foot against the wall and tugged with both hands at the knob. Something creaked faintly, but his foot slithered on a patch of mould. He wedged his foot again and tugged; the slash on his arm was throbbing. He felt movement—it might be the knob working loose in its socket.
He rested. He knew he must reach the basement. That was where John Strong had used his power on his victims. Whatever he had used to control them, he must have kept it down there, safe from them; they would never have dared the basement. The source of John Strong’s power was there.
Chris braced both hands on the doorknob. It was dim and slimy. He jammed his feet against the wall and heaved at the knob, heaved until his shoulders ached. Pain pounded in his arm. The door was creaking. It was giving. With a loud crack it sprang open, gasping a thick smell of earth at him.
Peering down, he made out a large room. Slivers of light through the choked slits at the tops of the windows lay stranded, glistening. There was no furniture, only the dully glistening floor: it looked like a marsh at twilight.
He didn’t want to go down there. It was too much like something he feared, that darkness. But he had to. There was nowhere else he could go. He struck a match clumsily and ventured onto the stone steps.
Though the basement was large, he felt penned in. The flickering darkness shifted close to him; he was going down into crumbling earth. His sandals rang dully on the steps. On the bottom step he halted, fumbling for another match. The spent match hissed briefly, somewhere in the dark. He stepped out into the basement, and his footsteps became a moist whisper.
There was no floor, only earth. It closed on his sandals like lips; it squeezed moistly over them, licking his feet. The darkness crumbled toward him. There was nothing but earth and a number of flat stones scattered near the walls. Above him the ceiling hovered fluttering, vague and huge; a drop of moisture blinked, then fell.
The flame crept toward his fingers. He had to let in the dark before he could light another match. He dropped the match before it burned him; the earth hissed as it put out the flame. The darkness caved in around him. He scrabbled at the matchbox, and its drawer fell out, spilling all the matches on the wet earth. As his feet moved in panic, the earth seemed to stir wakefully beneath him. The darkness filled his eyes and mouth triumphantly, choking off his scream. It filled him.
And did nothing. It was no threat. It was hardly dark at all. His eyes grew used to the light seeping through the slits of windows. The earth glistened, crawling with dim light. What he needed was beneath that earth. There was nowhere else John Strong could have hidden it. He must dig. He stooped, hands ready. But the slash on his arm began to sting, and he remembered something.
Outside the house, the sunlight hurt his eyes. It made him more anxious to get back to the basement. He hurried to the tin wall where the mechanical shovel howled. Nobody was in sight. He grabbed a spade from the lorry and ran back toward the house.
He had almost reached the house when he saw the car turning into Mulgrave Street.
It had no business here, it looked too expensive. He clambered over the rubble beside the house and listened. When he heard the car halt at the corner of Amberley Street he dodged into a room of the next house that had remained almost intact—only its fourth wall was scattered over its floor.
He heard Edmund say, “That is it.”
“Couldn’t they knock it down?” George said. “Why leave just this one?”
Clare wasn’t with them. Chris listened to their approaching footst
eps, crunching over broken glass. They’d go straight in; he’d left the front door open. They had no reason to come round here. They’d better not. He lifted the spade; its sharp edge glittered.
Flies swarmed near him. He slapped them away with the spade. The swarm drifted away, then returned. They weren’t drawn to him. They were drawn to something in the rubble. He looked down.
He was running from the car crash, hands full. The man was chasing him. He ran into Mulgrave Street. He heard the man’s footsteps, pounding along a side terrace. He glanced along the side streets, looking for a hiding place. Someone might look out of one of the houses at the noise. He caught sight of a house standing by itself, probably abandoned. He ran around it and hurled his burden into the rubble, throwing a few chunks of brick on top of it. Then he ran toward Princes Avenue.
Chris gazed down at the swarming rubble. Emotion welled up in him. He let it come; he mustn’t struggle now, with his pursuers in earshot. Slowly he began to grin. He was home at last. He’d been home before and hadn’t known it. At last he felt completely safe, free, calm. There was no struggle at all within him. Whatever happened now, he would be all right.
He leaned against the wall, grinning. He heard George and Edmund reach the house: Perhaps Clare wasn’t working with them, after all. He hoped she would come to the house by herself while he was there, since she liked playing games with him. He’d just thought of a game he would enjoy playing.
Surely nobody could live here, George thought. The hall was damply chill; it smelled of earth and wet stone and paper—it smelled like a ruin sinking into a marsh. There was no place for life here; it would suffocate.
“We’ll start at the top,” Edmund said.
Beneath the stairs a door stood ajar. George had assumed they would head for the basement, but he followed. The staircase was even colder than the hall. Each stair gave a separate sharp creak. A strip of wallpaper had flopped across the stairs. Small pale grubs squirmed on its underside; some had been trampled. George imagined groping upstairs here at night.
The first floor stank of urine. A flex like a rat’s tail dangled above the landing. In the dimness George failed to see that the floorboards were scattered with plaster; he slithered. “Hell is murky”—but for once Shakespeare couldn’t sum up the situation. The underbelly of the ceiling hung down, grey and sweating.
A trickle of stained sunlight lay across the hall: a door was ajar. Beside it the wall had broken out in pale pimples of chewing gum. The lower half of the door was covered with trails of urine. Edmund reached out gingerly and pushed the door open.
The curtains were drawn, warding off most of the sunlight. In the room a young woman sat on a collapsed bed. George was sure she was young, but her breast in the baby’s mouth was withered. She gazed out of the room at them, indifferently.
When George stepped forward, startled and horrified, she hurried forward and kicked the door shut. George saw that her pupils were huge and moist, but lifeless. He heard her dragging something against the door. “Junkie,” Edmund explained, shaking his head.
George was about to demand what they were going to do about the baby when he realized they were being watched.
He whirled, grabbing at the wall; fallen plaster shifted in its cradle of wallpaper. The man was standing at the top of the stairs to the attics. His small body stooped as he peered at George with one eye; the other socket was bright pink. He wore a raincoat the colour of the dim light. One sleeve was missing; his bare arm hung slackly almost to the floor. He drooled. As soon as Edmund gazed up at him the man burst into tears and scuttled back into an attic.
“Jesus,” Edmund said. George gazed at where the man had been. From the edge of his eye he glimpsed sunlight creeping out behind them, into the hall. The other first-floor door was opening.
A burly man stood there. The bib of his faded overalls was thick with old food. He hefted an iron bar above his head as he advanced toward them. His face was smooth and bland as an infant’s, but his eyes were those of a man backed into a corner, defending it, although he hardly knew why. Behind him George could see the room he was defending. Except for a pile of old newspapers against the wall, it was completely bare.
“It’s all right,” Edmund reassured the man. “We’ve got permission to look around.”
The man kept advancing. That wasn’t the way to handle him, George thought scornfully. He stood his ground. “Just you put that down,” he told the man. The two of them could handle him. He was glad to have something to confront at last, something more solid than the suffocating atmosphere of depression.
But Edmund was plucking at his elbow. “It’s all right. Leave it, George. We’ll talk outside.”
Suddenly George knew why Edmund had asked him to come: not for help in the search, but for reassurance. Edmund was a coward; he hadn’t even known anyone lived here. George let himself be urged out of the house.
The man followed them at the bar’s length. He kept the bar poised above his head. He waited on the front steps while Edmund and George got into the car, then he retreated into the house. George glimpsed his face as the door closed; he looked more trapped than before.
“Well, that’s that,” George said.
Edmund was pondering. “Maybe not,” he said. “We didn’t look right. We couldn’t live in a place like that. But you know someone who wouldn’t look like an intruder? Chris Barrow.” He started the car. “There’s an Arts Centre somewhere near here,” he said. “They’ll know where he lives.”
Everyone had a partner but Ranjit. “Now, you do something,” Clare told him, “and I must copy it exactly.” Around them in the hall the children were being mirrors of each other. Ranjit lifted his right hand timidly; so did Clare. He lifted his right leg; so did she. He looked as if he felt awkward and foolish; so did she, probably.
When there was an odd child out in the warm-up games Clare would partner him. It was always the selfconscious one nobody else wanted to play with; Clare was skilled in helping the odd ones, for she had to lose her selfconsciousness too. But today she felt foolish as well. She had been foolish, incredibly foolish, at Chris’s flat.
She hadn’t dared go back to explain. After dinner she’d decided to write to him. But she couldn’t think of words to explain her behaviour; she was exhausted after school and her adventure. She had torn one letter up, had scribbled the note asking him to phone her. When she saw him she’d be able to explain.
Ranjit made a face; so did she, and he laughed. He was gaining confidence. “Now you copy me,” she said. As soon as she’d woken this morning she had remembered what she’d done. She could hardly believe she had been so idiotic. What must poor Chris have thought, finding his flat burgled, his poster torn?
She smiled encouragement at Ranjit as he joined the others. They were being trees dying of pollution: their own idea. Pollution was the term project. She watched them, glad to relax for a while. During the night she had seen someone lying under a sheet. As she’d approached, the feet—or what she had taken to be feet—stirred and scuttled out from beneath the sheet, leaving a spreading stain at the ends of the legs.
The children improvised in groups, dropping litter, lecturing each other. John was trying to turn his group into a fight. Earlier he had been sobbing. “They’ve taken his granma away,” Hilary had told her. Clare joined the group and began to drop litter, so that John had to shout at her and exhaust some of his feelings.
She only wished Chris would ring, so that she could tell him how sorry she was. Not over the phone; she’d arrange to meet him. Margery’s group improvised, then Tommy’s. “English people always pick up litter,” Tommy told Ranjit. A phone was ringing.
Clare glanced uneasily at Ranjit, but he retorted, “You have more litter to pick up.”
He grinned when everyone else laughed. The phone had stopped. Someone was hurrying toward the hall. Clare gazed at the door, but the deputy head had hurried by. Oh, why didn’t Chris phone? Had her burglary made him feel so vulnerable tha
t he didn’t trust anyone? Was he sitting in his flat, brooding?
She gasped. Sandra’s group faltered, glancing at her. “No, it’s all right,” she said, flustered. “Go on.” She had just realized how much of a fool she was. Chris knew she had been the intruder. The girl in the kaftan must have described her to him. Clare’s letter must have read like a deception, a trick. That was why he wouldn’t phone.
Sandra had spontaneously become a piece of litter, fluttering around on the floor. If Chris wouldn’t phone, she must phone him, insist on meeting him. He mustn’t think she was trying to trick him. Sandra was rolling at people’s legs, showing off. “Now, Sandra,” Clare said, “that was good. Don’t spoil it.” Hurry up, twelve o’clock, hurry up.
Mrs. Allen, the deputy head, was in her office. “Of course you may use the phone, dear. Is everything all right?”
“Yes, I think so.” But Chris wasn’t at the Arts Centre; no, he hadn’t been for days. “Thank you,” Clare said, cutting her off hastily; she hadn’t much time. “If anyone wants me I’ll be back after lunch,” she told Mrs. Allen.
“All right, dear. Off to see your boyfriend?”
Despite everything, Clare found herself smiling. “Yes, that’s right,” she said.
They couldn’t find Chris’s name among the doorbells; a wire sprouted from an unnamed socket. “Let’s see if he’s upstairs,” Edmund said, nudging the front door further open.
George pulled his sleeve impatiently back from his watch. Nearly quarter to one. They’d had to wait an hour for someone to arrive at the Arts Centre. He wanted to get back to the Newsham; next week’s posters were supposed to arrive on Wednesday now, so that he could check them. But he didn’t want Edmund exploiting the boy’s good nature. He followed.
A door on the first floor was ajar. Glancing in, George saw a torn poster for Bonnie and Clyde. “That might be him,” he said. “He liked that film.”
The doll who ate his mother: a novel of modern terror Page 18