The Truants

by Lee Markham

  He started to head across to his car.

  He thought back to that evening. The evening everything had tilted over the edge into the realm of the absurd. The horror-show in the flat. The missing teeth.

  Fuck. The missing teeth. He’d forgotten about that.

  No wonder she’d felt funny.

  Her last words to him: I feel funny.

  Her last words before getting up and leaving.

  Her last words, a curious final little flourish to conclude her final, brutal assessment of the situation: I’ll tell you who stabbed Danny, Tom. Children did it. Filthy little rat-children. You’ll see. But you’ll never understand. You’re too soft.

  He took two more steps and then froze. His blood ran cold.

  Filthy little rat-children.

  His eyes widened.

  We’re here for the girl, rat.

  He stood there in the shadow of the burnt emporium and looked around for something solid. Something, anything that would tell him his mind had flipped and was seeing patterns that simply weren’t there. Couldn’t be there. Something, anything that would reassure him.

  But everywhere he looked he saw faces riven with confusion and fear. He saw smoke and broken buildings. He saw police tape and aftermath. Everything was falling apart and nothing was in its place or as it should be, and if he was seeing patterns it might be because he was tired, or it might be because he was coming apart at the seams, or it might be because there were patterns.

  We’re here for the girl, rat.

  Filthy little rat-children.

  He got himself moving then, got into the car and put the key in the ignition.

  This all started going supernova back at that flat. And they’d been at the flat because of the burnings on the bench. And here he was again at another burn, with nothing left but ash. And the only other person in the world who had joined any of these dots with him had disappeared in the immediate wake of it all ramping up.

  She knew something.

  She had to know something.

  She was the only connective tissue in this whole sorry mess.

  Filthy little rat-children.

  Fuck.

  Children had been disappearing.

  Filthy little rat-children.

  He turned the key in the ignition, put the car into gear and sped away.

  4

  She ignores the knocking on the door until it becomes a little frantic. She doesn’t sigh or grumble or express any kind of irritation or frustration that someone is dragging her from her bed at this hour because she doesn’t feel these things. She doesn’t feel anything. Not any more. She goes to the door simply because it’s the surest way to make the tapping stop.

  She rubs her eyes and pushes the pile of letters on the doormat to one side, reaches to unhook the chain and finds it already dangling. Careless. She doesn’t care. She turns the oval knob on the lock and pulls the door half open.

  What she sees outside is not possible.

  Her heart stops while her brain desperately tries to fire up and assess the ridiculous information it is receiving and deliver an assessment on its feasibility. The sky beyond the balcony is starting to brighten. A clear, bright winter’s day is on its way. The sun will soon be up. And there on the stoop, pushing himself into the shade of the corner, still wearing the school uniform he’d been wearing the last time she saw him over a month ago now on the morning of the day he died, is her son.

  She freezes, and in that frozen moment tumbles slowly, wordlessly back into her life.

  Her heart continues to hold.

  Her mouth falls open and silence comes out.

  He looks up at her with fear in his pale eyes, fear and something else. Something like age. Oldness. He looks haunted. Like he’s lived the entirety of another life since he’s been gone. He looks at her and says just one word: ‘Mummy?’

  That starts her heart again. It thunders and clatters and blood rushes to her head. She wobbles on her feet and her vision narrows down to a tunnel. She almost blacks out and goes down, but doesn’t – she leans against the door frame and takes a deep breath while at the same time frantically shoving the door open against the letter-drift fighting against her on the floor behind it.

  She falls to her knees and puts her hands on his face and touches him tentatively to confirm he is real.

  He is cold. Freezing.

  But he is very real. Very there.

  He looks tiredly at her face while her hands flit and fret across his whole body before flying around behind him and pulling him into a crushing embrace. She makes a strange sound then, as she holds him, something between a guttural moan and a warbling sing-song trill. He allows her to sweep him into her embrace, falling into her bosom, his knees bending and giving up his weight to her. He rests his head on her shoulder and closes his eyes. ‘Mummy,’ he whispers.

  ‘Oh baby. Oh, my baby boy…’

  ‘Mummy… can we go inside?’

  She doesn’t answer him. She takes it as an instruction as opposed to a request and simply goes back into the flat, carries him through to the now litter-strewn living room. She puts him on the sofa and sits beside him and tries to devour him with her eyes. A part of her mind tells her with no hint of doubt in its voice that she has now crossed the line from grief to insanity. The rest of her mind doesn’t care. The rest of her mind welcomes insanity as a perfectly acceptable alternative to the endless agony of her loss. And here insanity is, sitting on the sofa beside her, looking weary beyond description, pale and cold. But it is him. And he is looking at her. And there is love in his eyes.

  The rising sun starts to snoop around the upper corners of the room. He looks up at the band of light and then sadly down at his hands. ‘Could you close the curtains?’

  She does so without hesitation. She clicks the light on as she returns to him. ‘Where have you been, baby? Where have you been?’

  ‘I’ve been away, Mama. I can’t say, really. It’s hard to explain. But I’m back now. Is that OK? Is it OK for me to come back? Can I stay?’ His blue eyes widen and well up and his bottom lip starts to tremble. He starts to shake and can barely look at his mother. That is when she breaks. Again. Breaks from a million tiny pieces back into one. When she becomes a mother again.

  She pulls him to her again, holds him again, and tells him of course. Of course he can stay. She never wants to be away from him ever again. And if he ever puts a scare on her like that again she’ll probably kill him herself. She rocks him back and forth and he sobs into her breast for some time, and after a while he falls asleep on her. He doesn’t snore.

  Because he doesn’t breathe.

  She shakes him when she notices that, her heart ready once more to drop her directly back into the dread embrace of the nightmare. She shakes him and he murmurs, and his eyes flutter reluctantly open. ‘Mama?’

  ‘Baby… why don’t you breathe? Why aren’t you breathing?’ There is a shrill splinter in her voice.

  ‘Because I died, Mama. Someone killed me. But then this old thing brought me back, and he’s been keeping me all this time. I wanted to come home, Mama, I swear it. But he wouldn’t let me. He made me stay. He hated everything. He made me do things…’

  She pales at that, and swallows. ‘What did he make you do?’

  ‘He just… he just got inside my head and… he… I was like a robot for him. He was in my head and he made the decisions and… he just made me do the stuff that he had to get done for him because he didn’t have a body of his own any more and he couldn’t do anything without me. I don’t want to talk about it Mama. He brought me back though. And now he’s gone. So it’s OK, Mama.’ His voice rises into a wail and his face wrenches into the bawl of a child whose sadness is too large to contain. ‘It’s OK Mama…’ he sobs.

  She doesn’t understand a word of it. It makes no sense whatsoever. Sleep-talk, surely. She holds him close and he cries and he cries and eventually he goes back to sleep.

  This time she doesn’t wake him.


  He sleeps the whole day. She checks him regularly, and each time she does so she gently pokes or nudges him to check for a response. Her son doesn’t breathe any more and that terrifies her. But he wriggles and turns away from her when she pokes him, and that is enough to put her mind at rest. Enough for now.

  She has her boy back. He is different now. But he is still him. Still her Danny. And that is enough. They’d figure everything else out as they go.

  He wakes up to the smell of frying onions and the sound of boiling water bubbling on the stove. Bolognaise. The flat has been tidied and it feels like home again. He pushes himself up and goes through to the kitchen. She is humming to herself as she cooks. He looks at her with tired eyes. ‘Mama?’

  She turns and smiles at him.

  ‘I’m gonna get my ’jamas on. And have a wash. OK?’

  ‘OK sweetie. I’m cooking your favourite.’ She grins and there is joy in her eyes.

  ‘I know, Mama. I’m not… not too hungry though.’ Not for what she is preparing. He’ll have to talk to her about that too. But not yet.

  Not yet.

  Some of the joy leaves her eyes at that, not all of it, but some. ‘Maybe I’ll have some later. I’m just tired and wanna get in my ’jamas. You have some now though.’ He nods enthusiastically at her. ‘And maybe we can watch a film?’

  He goes then and washes and changes and tries to pretend that everything can return to normal. He knows that it can’t. He isn’t the same as before. Nor is she. But maybe just for a little while, everything can be the same as it was.

  Maybe they can pretend.

  When he goes back through to the living room, the lights are dim and the movie cued up. A plate with the remnants of pasta sauce painted across it sits on the coffee table in front of her. He parks himself on the sofa beside her and snuggles up. She folds her arm round him and takes his cold hand in hers. She hits play and the movie starts.

  The movie has werewolves in it.

  His friends told him so.

  He likes werewolves.

  They watch the movie together.

  She squeezes his hand and he squeezes hers back.

  At some point a tear weaves silently across her cheek.

  They move into an uncertain future together. For the moment it is OK.

  For the moment.

  And he doesn’t offer her the gift. And nor does she ask for it. Not yet.

  Not yet.

  EPILOGUE

  GLORY

  1

  Tom stood on the bridge and watched the sun go down over the water. The land was flat and uncrowded here. He liked it here. It was everything the city wasn’t.

  The air was cold. Winter had stormed in after a mild – hot in places – autumn and the chill really bit. He pulled up the collar of his heavy wool coat, turned south and walked along the road towards The White Hart. He went in and ordered a pint of the local ale and found himself a seat beside the fire. He undid the buttons of his coat but kept it on. He leant back in his seat and looked at the fire through the drink. A harmony of gold.

  It had been a year since everything. Since the city collectively, and momentarily, lost its mind and tore itself apart. A year since the world had found a million other things to fret about and it had all slipped without fanfare into the past.

  And a year since Anna had disappeared.

  He raised the drink to his lips and took a sip. It was good. It always was. He took another and set it back down. One pint before the three-mile walk along the riverside track back to the cottage, where his wife and daughter would be waiting for him. Dinner would be ready in an hour. Plenty of time. He needn’t hurry. Within reason.

  They’d been coming here for years, but on this occasion it was more than it had ever been before. It had always been restorative, but this time it was deeper, richer. Better. It felt better.

  He felt better.

  He’d found nothing at Anna’s flat when he’d got there. He’d kicked the door open and gone straight in. She hadn’t been there. There was no sign that she’d been there recently. No sign that she hadn’t. There’d been no note. No voicemail on her phone. Except for a couple of automated insurance sales calls. Nothing. Except for all her stuff. Her whole life. Still there. Untouched. Unmoved.

  Sitting in The White Hart, he had to really push his imagination to try and recall the madness that had clamoured in his head as he’d driven from the burnt emporium to Anna’s flat. What had he been thinking?

  Rat.

  One word. Rat. That had been it. That had been all of it. But for just a moment it had been everything. He’d raced across the city thinking maybe Anna had somehow been involved in the outbreak of violence that had preceded and perhaps even triggered the riots. And so, at her flat, he’d smashed his way in and… nothing.

  Nothing at all.

  Of course nothing. It didn’t make sense.

  For a while it had bothered him. Troubled him. He’d worried about her. Still did from time to time. But life had moved on. Things had settled down. The storm had passed and his hope had rallied. As perhaps it always would have. Just the way he was built.

  He mulled over these things along with many others as he drank his ale, and when he was done he quietly parked his glass on the table, buttoned up his coat and walked through the pub and out into the garden. He could look east from here, out across the broad stretch of water that reached out towards the sea. He wondered if that stretch of water was a sound of water. Don’t know. He shrugged and headed down to the gate at the foot of the sloped lawn that opened out onto the footpath that gilded the water’s edge all the way back towards home.

  The path led south for a few hundred metres before it forked east and south-west. As he took the eastbound fork he saw a young family heading down from the south-west path. Father, mother, young son. He guessed son – young child in a warm hooded coat. Duffel coat. Reminded him of Paddington Bear. The child skipped boyishly on ahead of his parents, looking back every now and then to check they were following, which they were, at a casual amble. The way she held a hand to her belly told Tom that the child skipping down the path towards him would soon have to get his head around not being the sole centre of the universe. They looked happy. He smiled and raised a hand.

  They seemed to pause momentarily before the man raised a hand in return.

  Tom liked that about this place. That people were so few and far between you could actually greet them in passing. He headed on east and left the family behind him, picking up the pace now as the rapidly increasing gloom of the evening made the shadows ever more impenetrable.

  At the outskirts of the village a bunch of kids bundled laughingly past him and cut left down through the gorse bushes to the playing fields and the swings. If they’d been city kids he would have assumed they’d been heading down to the fields to get drunk. Or high. But they’re not city kids. They’re probably just going to chase each other around and banter. High jinks. Nothing more than that.

  He tramped around the last few turns of the gravelled pathway and the cottage swung into view. It couldn’t have been more picture-postcard if it tried. That’s why he’d chosen it. From the white picket fence to the low ceilings and the rope-swing hanging from the tree in the front garden. Light poured out from every window on the ground floor. He clacked through the gate and up the path to the door. He paused then, and crept round to the kitchen window. He could hear his wife and daughter discussing how much something needed stirring. He peeped in and saw his daughter stood on a chair at the kitchen sideboard, clumsily manhandling a huge wooden spoon and gripping the edge of an enormous bowl. His wife was behind her, ready to pounce the second that spoon, bowl or daughter, or any combination of the above, toppled or took flight across the kitchen. ‘OK baby, that’s good, let me take it now.’

  The young girl, ever the princess, refused to submit control and poked a shoulder out in defiance of her mother’s suggestion, tightening her grip on both spoon and bowl, ‘Not ready yet Mummy.�
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  His wife looked up at the ceiling in exasperation, and quietly stamped her own foot.

  He almost laughed out loud at that.

  Like mother, like daughter.

  He tiptoed back to the front door and went through to them.

  In the kitchen he walked up behind his wife, slipped his arms round her and nuzzled the back of her neck. ‘How my girls doing?’

  ‘Not ready yet Daddy!’

  His wife pushed back into his embrace. ‘Well this one’s about to throttle that one.’

  ‘Yeah?’ He put his hands on her tummy and, perhaps inspired by the family he’d seen on the way back from the pub, blurted out before he had a chance to stop, ‘Don’t want to make another one then?’

  She stiffened at that, turned, pushed him back and shot her most deadly serious expression up at him. And she looked so like the little girl fighting with the spoon and the bowl that he couldn’t help but burst out laughing. She thumped his chest and melodramatically turned away from him. It didn’t help his outburst of giggles any. That little foot-stamp again and he knew now that she was turning it on.

  ‘You’re such a bastard.’

  He held her again. ‘I know. I’m sorry.’

  She melted in his arms then. ‘You serious?’ She whispered.

  ‘I think I might be,’ he whispered back.

  She took his hands and put them on her belly.

  ‘Maybe…’ she said, ‘…maybe.’

  ‘Not yet Daddy!’ the child continued to insist, to the charmed amusement of her parents, ‘… not yet!’

  2

  I throw my arm round her waist and pull her to me as we head out into the bitter cold of the early evening. The newborn night. From the garden at the back of the rambling farmhouse we can see along the water to the darkness of the sea. If I were to head down to that water and sail north, eventually I’d hit the ice at the top of the world. No land between here and there. The thought sobers me. Heartens me. It gives everything a sense of scale.