It was real this time. It was going to happen, and Darren didn't care; his eyes were saying so. Marshall saw the hammer strain itself back. "N—" he moaned, terrified for Darren, and made to throw himself at the other boy and snatch the gun out of his mouth. But the hammer sprang, and he shut his eyes, and felt the sound of the revolver like a nail driven into his skull. "How about that then, lad?" Darren said. "Real enough for you?"
Marshall opened his eyes to get rid of the pounding light, but it only spread into the room. "Too real."
"What's up with you? Like you said, it's only a game. Let's see you do what I just did."
Marshall had to, or he would be letting his friend down—that was the meaning in Darren's eyes now. Marshall stretched out his hand for the weapon, and couldn't understand why he was having difficulty until he realised he was still holding onto the wrist. He made himself relinquish his grip, and closed his hand, which was stinging with sweat, around the butt. A trickle of Darren's saliva glistened on the barrel, and he thought of slugs, the five of them nesting together under the other boy's chair. He wiped the muzzle on his sleeve and pointed the gun at his mouth, supporting the butt with both hands. His teeth were clenched, his tongue was pressed so hard against them he could hear it through his skull. He shoved at his tight lips with the muzzle and prised them apart, and the gun banged against his teeth.
Either they got out of the way or they would ache worse. His jaw dropped, and the barrel nudged his tongue, filling his mouth with the taste of metal. If he had to put up with that for long he would be sick. He took a firmer grip on the butt and poked one thumb inside the guard, and felt the trigger shift to make room. It was less stiff than previously, or perhaps he was more used to handling it. He raised his eyes to meet Darren's, and saw his friend urging him to do as he'd done. The ache which had been growing in his wrist flared through his arm, and the gun jerked out of his mouth as he had a thought. "Darren—"
"What fucking now?"
"We're not playing it right. You're supposed to spin the, you know, the middle bit each time."
"Who says?"
"That's what they do in all the movies," Marshall said, feeling he was in one as he spun the cylinder. When it came to a halt the gun felt subtly changed. It occurred to him that he could sense where the weight of the single bullet was. Before, it had been directly under the hammer, and now it was to one side of it—the left, he was practically certain. So there was no reason for him not to turn the gun on himself. He opened his mouth as wide as he'd ever done for a dentist, and tickled the roof of his mouth with the muzzle, and squeezed the trigger. He'd already heard the click in his mind when it became real. "See, I did it," he said, dropping the gun in his lap.
"If you're going to play like that we'll start again."
"All right." Marshall handed him the revolver. "All right, but let's not play for money."
"What else do you want to play for, a fuck?"
"No, I'm serious. I just thought. I'll do six and you don't have to do any, but if I win you have to let me stay until my mom comes to fetch me."
"Fucking hell."
Darren sounded both frustrated and reluctantly admiring. "So is it a deal?" Marshall persisted.
"We'll see what my mam says when she gets home."
Marshall saw that was the best Darren could offer, and it seemed fine to him; surely no nurse would turn him out of the house while he was ill. "Hand it over, then," he said.
Darren made his incredulous face again as he passed him the revolver. Marshall no longer knew what the expression was meant to communicate, but it didn't matter, any more than the sight of the muzzle homing in on him. He took hold of it and swung the butt into his other hand, and spun the cylinder. He let the gun fall against his chest, the muzzle beneath his chin, and bore down on the trigger.
There was a click, as he'd known there would be. Six consecutive shots were beginning to appear rather more ambitious than they had when he'd proposed them, but he needn't worry, because he would be able to sense if the bullet was under the hammer. In any case, he had only five shots to go. He gazed at Darren, the solitary visible member of the audience, while he lowered the gun to his lap and spun the cylinder. When he raised the gun he was sure he could feel it weighing slightly leftward, where the bullet must be. He lifted the barrel under his chin with his free hand. "Two," he said.
Click, of course. The ache in his weakening wrist seemed far more of a problem than anything the gun would do. They fell, and he dealt the cylinder a spin and hoisted the revolver. Still weighted to the left. "Three."
Click, and the ache found his elbow and dropped his forearm so abruptly that the butt bruised his right thigh. He couldn't falter while Darren was watching, waiting for him to give up. A spin of the cylinder made his fingers throb, and the barrel stung them when he closed them around it. Had he remembered to weigh where the bullet was? Yes, on the left again. "Four."
Click, and he winced as the butt clubbed his thigh. This time he used his knuckles against the cylinder, scraping skin off them. He must be achieving the same amount of spin each time—either that or there was some bias in the cylinder, since the weight was to the left still. He held the barrel in his stinging fist and propped them against his chest. "Five," he said, and the click seemed to penetrate every inch of him, because it had struck him that he mightn't be locating the bullet at all, that the gun might not be quite symmetrical. Was anything? He'd kept hold of the barrel so that the gun couldn't thump him yet again, and now he managed to support the gun in mid-air, though his hand wobbled badly, while he spun the cylinder as hard as he could. It whirred to a stop, and he hefted the revolver.
As far as he was able to judge, its balance hadn't changed. He no longer knew where the bullet was, but he had only one shot to go and then he could stay with his friend. He lifted the gun with both hands and poked himself under the chin. The metal circle, which felt huge, dug into his flesh. He couldn't fire until he'd counted, but his tongue was paralysed by the nearness of the muzzle. "Sss," he said, and heard how he must sound to Darren. Contempt for himself made him clench his fist, thumbing the trigger down. "Six," he blurted, convinced that he had to say it before the hammer fell, just as it did.
His skull exploded with pain. The room was blotted out. He felt his body retreat from him, driven by the shock. An onslaught of light filled his consciousness, and then his leg jerked as his hand and the revolver struck it. As he managed to grasp that his head was aching with tension, the blinding pain began to dwindle, and after perhaps a few seconds he was able to open his eyes. Darren was watching him expressionlessly. "I did it," Marshall gasped.
"You never counted one, lad."
"I didn't say I would. I said I'd take six shots, and I did. I won." Marshall fumbled for the barrel through the surges of light which threatened to wipe out his surroundings, and flung the weapon away from him. He saw it turn in the air, its muzzle swivelling toward Darren, and was all at once sure that the bullet was lined up with the hammer, so that when the revolver struck the floor—He tried to shove himself out of the chair with his weakened hands, but the thought was already too late. The gun thumped the carpet, and that was all. "Can I get some sleep now?" he said as the light and the pain in his skull continued to throb.
"You can try. Don't bet on it." Darren stared at the gun as though he was thinking of picking it up, then let it lie. "Reckon soon you'll be getting all the rest you need," he muttered.
26 The Call
Susanne awoke remembering her search for Marshall. He hadn't been any of the boys who had clustered around the Volvo to offer themselves to her and to anyone else who might be in it, some of them at least as young as Marshall but with faces several times that age. He hadn't been among the children running away from an Indian jewelry store which had been set on fire. She'd thought she recognised him outside an all-night pharmacy until the small figure had turned, catching a neon gleam on the syringe in his arm. Nor had Marshall been the child she'd seen dragged, scre
aming like an injured animal, into a car which had screeched away before she could read the number-plate. His hadn't been the body sprawled in the middle of a road, the blue pulse of an ambulance insistently blackening its spillage of blood. He hadn't been in any of the piles of newspapers in shop doorways, though each of the piles to which she'd stooped had poked out at least one head, and she hadn't found him among the inhabitants of a gap between the houses of a derelict street, people crowding so closely around a fire that their clothes had begun to smoulder.
She hadn't seen that. Though the memories were so vivid and detailed that she was no more able to dislodge them from her mind than to wipe the grubby coating of night from her eyes, she had only dreamed them. That wasn't even slightly comforting, because she could believe in all of them. Worse still, she'd projected them on the screen of her mind instead of trying to find Marshall.
A streetlamp died as she caught sight of it. It was daylight, and Marshall had been out all night, and she had never felt so alone. If she were a character in any of the movies he liked she wouldn't have stayed home, she would have sped from episode to episode of her search, experiencing only a sketch of emotions. If Don were alive one of them could have stayed by the phone while the other searched, but she hadn't felt able to leave the house in case Marshall needed to reach her. Suppose he'd called and she hadn't been there? Hilda Mattison had seen her light on after midnight and had sat with her to make increasingly small talk, not to mention cups of tea, while her husband Matt, a large shy man whose stomach was outgrowing its shirt and purple cardigan, had driven around the streets. He'd looked even more abashed than usual on his eventual return, and quite prepared to start another search although it was past two in the morning. Susanne had been afraid that he might have an accident through drowsiness, and so she'd sent them both home, having had to promise that she would wake them if she needed anything. She'd watched lights climb the inside of their house and go out one by one, and then there had been nothing to do but wait with all her thoughts.
She'd vowed she wouldn't go to sleep. She'd brought in the cordless telephone and held it on her lap, then she'd made herself place it on the table and wondered how to keep herself awake. She'd tried to read the essays, but the first had taken her aback: an unexpectedly bitter piece from Rosemary, a quiet student who required hardly any provocation to blush. Every British film had to have Americans in or behind it, British video stores were really American as far as the films they stocked were concerned and the token World Cinema section was an insult to the rest of the world, all this fostered an addiction to Americanism, just as the tobacco companies were paying to have actors smoke in almost every film... Maybe most of this was true, but Susanne hadn't wanted to contemplate it just then; it had made her feel more isolated than ever. She'd attempted to watch television, but the only transmission on any of the four channels had shown her Peter Sellers, whom she'd always thought of as a comedian, trapping a young man's fingers in the lid of a record player and grinding an old man's pet terrapin under his heel. She'd switched off the television and had watched the empty street beneath the unrelenting lamps until sleep had begun to nod her head. She'd jerked it up, she'd pinched her upper arms, she'd staggered to the bathroom to douse her face with cold water. Nevertheless she had slept several times, feeling worse every time she'd wakened. She had slept while Marshall was out somewhere in the dark.
She stumbled to the kitchen in an attempt to shake off the night. Her body felt brittle and stiff and as though she hadn't bathed for days. She made coffee so strong that at the first mouthful a shudder rushed all the way down her and back up to her scalp, then she clutched her portable radio and carried it and the mug to the bathroom, resting an elbow on the banister as she climbed each stair. She dropped her clothes in the washing basket and switched on the radio. She was in the bath, pirouetting like a dancer stuck in treacle through what the British apparently considered to be a powerful shower but which seemed hardly palpable, when a vigorous jingle announced the early breakfast news.
Most of yesterday's atrocities had had their moments of fame, though the police wanted it to be known that they were still looking for the gang who had smashed a bank guard's knees. Susanne twisted the taps shut and fought off the plastic curtain and stepped out of the trough of the bath. A teenage girl who had been thrown into a fire by three youths was described as comfortable in the hospital. A burglar had bitten several householders who'd caught him on their property, and they were being tested for infection. Half a dozen families who were accused of using one another's children, all of them younger than Marshall, for sex had been rounded up in Operation Nursery. Police were appealing for information regarding the whereabouts of Marshall Travis, twelve years old.
Speaks with an American accent, five feet five inches tall, blue eyes, fair hair, slight build, last seen wearing a purple Nike track suit and white Reebok trainers... Susanne wasn't sure which dismayed her more, how the description rendered him so present it was as though he had just stepped out of the room and yet so absent that the lack of him felt like an ache as big as the whole of herself, or how the appeal seemed far too generalised to identify him to the public: it hadn't mentioned the way he walked, swinging his arms and rolling a little as though he'd just disembarked from a ship, or his habit of patting the crown of his head to reassure himself that no hair was standing up, or his lopsided smile which was all she had left of his father... She didn't realise how fiercely she was towelling herself until her nipples began to sting. She dabbed at them and finished drying herself, and switched off the radio and went into the bedroom, having wakened all her nerves, to get dressed.
She'd forgotten that the curtains were open since she'd slept downstairs. She dodged across the room and hid behind the right-hand curtain so as to pull it across. Then her hands almost yanked it off the rail. A man she'd never seen before was leaning over the wall into her garden.
Susanne dashed into the bathroom and grabbed her robe from the hook beside Marshall's. She struggled into the rough cloth as she padded fast across the landing, and tied the cord, strangling her waist, as she returned to the windows. The man was leaning farther, reaching a hand into the garden, showing her the whole of his naked scalp. She felt as though he was exposing himself to her. She slipped the bolts of the windows and padded onto the balcony, the chill of the stone seizing her feet. When the intruder didn't look up she cleared her throat, forcing out her voice. "What are you doing? What are you leaving there?"
The man raised his head: a broad brow crossed by three ridges of flesh, eyebrows like wads of dust, eyes rather too large for the rest of his face. He drew back his hand before meeting her gaze. "Just admiring your lavender, love."
She wasn't sure if she believed him—not when he stooped to lift something beyond the wall. The pinkish swelling of his scalp confronted her once more as she gripped the railing of the balcony with both cold hands. Then she heard a clink of glass, and realised what he was—didn't need to see the crate of milk bottles which he hoisted into view. "Sorry if I gave you a turn, love," he called. "The other lad's off sick."
Susanne had to clear her throat again as he turned away. "Take a sprig if you like."
"Aye, I will, then." He reached across the wall and broke off a twig, which he inserted in the top buttonhole of his work shirt. "Good bit of gardening you've done. It wasn't here last time I was."
"My—Thanks." She didn't trust herself to mention Don, not when the thought of him was the tip of so much grief, which didn't relate only to him. She watched the milkman trot away, crate jingling, to his wagon at the corner. She ought to have noticed that sooner. She mustn't let her fears blind her, or she would be no use to Marshall. She curtained the street and pulled on enough clothes to make herself feel less shivery, and took the radio and telephone downstairs, telling herself she had to eat breakfast to keep up her strength.
She managed to eat nearly half a bowl of cereal before the question of what, if anything, Marshall might have eaten sinc
e she'd last seen him turned the food to soggy cardboard in her mouth. She had to wash the mouthful down with a gulp of coffee so bitter it made her head swim. After that there seemed to be nothing to do except brush her teeth before returning to her chair in the front room.
She tried to grade the essays, setting Rosemary's aside for when she felt able to be objective about it, and waited for the University switchboard to be staffed so that she could call in. The eight o'clock news came first, and she listened to it to reassure herself that the item about Marshall was repeated and nothing new was said about him, though what was reassuring about that? The description was there, again without a headline. That had to mean he soon wouldn't be news, because he would have been found safe. The news gave way to music, to uncommunicative silence as she switched off the radio, and the phone rang.
She snatched it up and pressed the talk button, her hand all at once so slippery that she almost dropped the receiver. "Susanne Travis."
"Susanne, is it? Is that Susanne?"
"That's right, Clement," she told him. "That's what I said."
"I thought it might be your, but I see you're there in the flesh. I hope I haven't called at, if it's inconvenient please do say."
"No no, it's fine," Susanne said, fighting not to let him reach her nerves. "What can I do for you?"
"Well, it's rather what I, what we, you should appreciate. I'm sure I speak for the department, indeed the entire, all of those who've heard the news."
"The"—the word almost blocked her throat—"news."
"About your young, is he not missing? My wife assured me that was what she just, isn't that the case, dear? I was at my ablutions, you understand." His voice, having veered away for five words, came back. "She gathered from the news that your, the name eludes me for the moment, you heard it, dear—"
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