Bad Faith

by Gillian Philip

  ‘No.’ Ming tried to frogmarch me back the way we’d come.

  I found I was crying. I turned once more, and that’s when Ming finally yelled at me.

  ‘You always look back, don’t you? You always have to look back!’

  He was angry, but I couldn’t be angry back because he was panicking, too. He began to run and I ran with him though my hip was starting to ache and smart worse than ever. His fingers were tight around my arm as if he was terrified of losing his hold, so I didn’t complain. Glancing back, he dodged into a side street, hauling me on. I didn’t understand why he was so afraid, though. Not till I heard the triumphant shout behind us, and Ming slid to a halt.

  ‘Bugger,’ said Ming.

  Same word, same tone of voice, same old reason. Jeremiah Maclaren had turned the corner after us, his gang behind him. His gang had got bigger. Much bigger. That wasn’t a gang any more, that was a mini-mob. I remembered, sick to my stomach, that despite his expensive education Jeremiah couldn’t spell very well.

  ‘Oy!’ Jeremiah bellowed. ‘You.’

  Ming stood half-turned to him, holding me with both hands. His thumbs rubbed my arms, but I don’t know if he was reassuring me or himself.

  There was something different in the way the gang moved and breathed, something alien and bad. I didn’t want Ming to get thumped again, and I didn’t much want another beating myself, but it was more than that, it was scarier. You could taste something in the air, an invisible chemical that made your heart beat faster and your head spin with fear. It made me want to run again, and sod my poor old hip, but Ming just stood there. Perhaps he thought he could talk his way out of it.

  ‘Jeremiah,’ he said. He licked his lips. ‘We’re not looking for trouble.’

  Jeremiah inched closer, his colleagues closing in at his back. I realised he was high, but he was high on something better than chemicals. His drug of choice: killing.

  ‘You’re always looking for trouble, Minger. You’ve got it now.’

  ‘Don’t do this, Jeremiah.’

  Jeremiah smirked. ‘Say please.’

  Ming shrugged. ‘Please don’t do this.’

  I wanted to meet his eyes, but I didn’t dare take mine off Jeremiah. I thought if Ming let go of my arms I might fall, because my hip felt as if it didn’t belong to me any more. Don’t do this to me! I yelled inwardly at my stupid body. Not right now! Now is not convenient!

  ‘See her?’ said Jeremiah, nodding at me. ‘Assaulted Rose Parsons. Rose is a good pious respectable kid, never harmed anyone, helps out in the soup kitchen at weekends. And this one half-strangled her. Broke her jaw.’ He gave a hissing sigh of world-weary sorrow.

  Despite his maudlin viciousness my heart leapt, because beyond the fidgeting mob I saw a police car slow and pause at the entrance to the side street. I waited for the creak and slam of a door, the sound of voices dispersing the sullen crowd, but it never came. I heard the engine noise purr louder, saw the white bodywork of the car slide away, and they were gone.

  Jeremiah had watched my eyes, and now he smiled and turned his back on us – that’s how confident he was – and addressed his acolytes like a regular little demagogue. ‘She put poor Rose in hospital, and she only got off with it because her father’s a cleric. A One Church Rector, yes, but he’s a filthy hypocrite! A maggot in the belly of the Church. He has no faith. He’s an unbeliever, an infidel, an apostate!’

  I gasped as if he’d punched me in the gut. How did he know that?

  ‘There’s worse.’ Jeremiah raised his hands, along with his voice. God, he was good. He must have been practising at home in front of his mirror. I couldn’t see his face but I could imagine his holy solemnity. Bishop Todd could switch it on like a cheap lightbulb, after all, and Jeremiah was his faithful devotee.

  When the muttering behind him died down, Jeremiah lowered his voice again, but you could hear it beautifully, every word, his voice expertly projected. ‘That one,’ he said, jerking his thumb at Ming. ‘That unbeliever? His parents are dangerous subversives, plotters against the Church and the Mother of the Nation. I met him the day the Bishop vanished, begged him to tell me if he’d seen the holy man, and do you know what his answer was?’

  Rumbling from the mob. ‘What?’ a voice shouted obligingly.

  Wearily, Jeremiah shut his eyes and sighed. ‘Laughter. Contemptuous laughter. That’s how much this infidel cared for Bishop Todd.’ He frowned thoughtfully, as if he was working something out in his head for the first time. ‘Know what, though? He was coming from the countryside, the beautiful countryside where our Bishop loved to walk. He had scratches on his face, he was... running. And he was there...’

  Jeremiah paused, gripped his head with his hands. For a long dramatic time he stayed like that, silent, as the atmosphere thickened with dread and hate.

  When he snapped his head up very suddenly, his voice was a disbelieving hiss. ‘It was the day he disappeared. The day. The Bishop. Died.’

  Jeremiah Maclaren turned on his heel to look right at me and Ming. His followers couldn’t see his face then, so they couldn’t see the most evil smirk I’ve ever seen in my life.

  Ming said, ‘Run.’

  I tried. Ming knew the streets, and that was the only reason they didn’t catch us straight away, because Ming knew where to dodge and duck and squeeze round impossible corners. But I couldn’t run fast, and I was breathless with terror and rage. Part of me wanted to go back and pound Jeremiah’s jaw to a pulp. But it wasn’t an option, and let’s face it, my terror outweighed my temper by about fifty parts to one.

  They were a powerful bunch of brutes, but unused to running. All they knew was how to string up defenceless boys, but enough rage was firing them to keep them on our heels. We kept ahead, just. Ming stumbled across the rubble of a demolition site, determinedly hanging on to me, and on that terrain we gained a good thirty metres of ground. They were too enraged to watch their feet, barging and shoving till they made one another stumble, but if they were clowns they were lethal ones.

  Cover would delay them though; and there was cover. A block of flats had been sliced in half by the bulldozers, exposing old ghosts and forgotten lives to the air. You could see the outline of doors and walls and fireplaces, the shape of pictures that had hung in smoky rooms.

  Ming yanked me into a doorway that used to be someone’s bedroom door, judging by the scraps of floral wallpaper that hung limp in the windless air. A child had put up stickers that someone had tried to scrape off. SpongeBob Squarepants and Scooby Doo. Amazing what you notice.

  The child was probably grown up by now. Maybe he was one of them. They hadn’t seen our hiding place but they were fanning out, taking more care, shouting encouragement to one another as they hunted through the derelict buildings and the rubble-strewn alleyways.

  Ming’s breathing was a high-pitched sound in his throat. He swallowed and shut his eyes tight, forcing back his panic. At last he got his wind back, and his control, and put his arms round my shoulders and buried his face in my neck. Only for an instant, though. He pushed me away and jerked his head and said, ‘You go that way.’

  ‘What?’ I looked where he was showing me, then back at him. ‘No.’

  ‘Yes. Please, please, Cass. Please don’t argue. You can’t outrun them. Please.’ He stroked my face with his thumbs, almost crying. ‘Please.’

  I touched his face back. I didn’t want to stop touching it. ‘Okay.’

  ‘See that tenement that’s still intact? Make for that. Just run, run as hard as you can. There’s a close running through to the main road. I’ll head for the river, that way.’

  I looked where he was pointing. ‘I don’t think you can get through...’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I can. No problem. Meet me in the wood, usual place. Right?’

  ‘Yes. Of course. Okay.’

  ‘And Cass?’ He held my face firmly and stared into it. ‘This time don’t look back.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Promise me. This time. D
o. Not. Look back. Swear it on...on my Pirate Orc Army of the Riverworld.’

  ‘Yes. Okay.’ I tried to smile at him. ‘Yes. I promise, I swear.’

  And that was it. No more time. He smiled back, then linked his fingers round mine and drew them down from his face.

  ‘They’re a good bit away. Down towards the sheds,’ he whispered, glancing out. His knuckles were white where they gripped the sad old doorpost. ‘There isn’t going to be a better time. Run, Cassie. Run.’

  • • •

  I kept my promise. This time I did.

  I did not look back, Ming, not even when I heard their shouts, heard them stumbling after me, hampered by the rubble. I had a bad hip, but I’d once been a Pirate Queen and God knew I could run over rocks better than anyone.

  I didn’t look back, so I don’t know when you fell back. I don’t know when they caught up with you. I don’t even know if you did it deliberately, my fall guy one more time. One minute you were running, that’s all I know, but you weren’t running for the river like you’d said, you were running behind me, I don’t know why. And the next I was running alone, pounding through the narrow bottleneck close, running even as I cried, knowing you weren’t running any more, that they’d brought you down, knowing it from the tone of their howls.

  Why didn’t you run where you said? Why did you run at my back, slower than I knew you could run?

  I don’t know. Because maybe I was a coward but I’d sworn and I’d promised, the last promise I’d ever make you. I wouldn’t look back, that’s what I told you.

  And this time I didn’t.

  21: Jetsam

  It was stupid to go to Ming’s house, but I couldn’t think where else to go, and I’d been curled in a derelict shed on a patch of waste ground for ages, hugging my knees and wishing I could cry. I was completely numb, couldn’t feel a thing, but there was a reason for that. My heart was lying in my chest in two pieces and I couldn’t think how to put it back together.

  So maybe my brain was in pieces too. Going back to Ming’s house was an incredibly bad idea, but I couldn’t face my family, and no way was I going to the police.

  Besides, I’d promised Ming. I’d kept my promise about not looking back, and that was a good start. I was going to keep my other promise and meet him in the wood like he’d said, because if I was a good girl, if I never broke my word ever again, maybe Ming would be there. God would do this one thing for me since I hadn’t asked for anything else in a long time. He might glower and stroke his beard and tap his fingers on his desk but he’d do this one thing for me because I was going to be good from now on, and I’d do anything, anything.

  Being omniscient, God must know that, so he’d make sure the last hour never happened and Ming would meet me in the wood. No, no, He’d make sure of it. I had to start thinking of Him in capital letters again, if I was going to make any impression on the old Infinite Mercy.

  Ming would expect me to rescue Keyser Soze, so though Keyser Soze hated his pet carrier as much as he hated me, and my arms were covered in deep ragged gouges by the time I managed to heave the cage door shut, there was no way I was leaving him. Laying his ears flat on his head he hissed and rowled at me as I shoved random items into my backpack. They were all Ming’s things. My stuff didn’t matter, but I had to get this to Ming so he could get away. He’d need a toothbrush.

  I stood for a moment, trying to think if I’d forgotten anything.

  That’s when the silence in the house became solid, weighing down on me like a sodden mattress. Terror clenched my throat, because it was so unexpected, that fear, so very out of place. I’d never been scared in Ming’s house, never.

  There was a sound. The click of a latch? The knock of a foot against a skirting board? Or only the tap of a branch against a window? But there was no wind out there. Perhaps a bird had brushed its wings against the glass.

  It couldn’t be ghosts. There were none here: all the ghosts were in the wood, where I should have gone at once. I knew that now, I knew I shouldn’t have come here. My own heart was killing me, choking me with its insane clattering in my chest and throat.

  I made myself creep down the stairs, one at a painful time. I even turned the corner at the landing with my eyes still open. I blinked at the downstairs hallway, and air rushed into my lungs in a single huge sob. Nothing there, nothing and no-one.

  Almost out. Surely I’d imagined the creak of a hinge. There couldn’t be anything lurking behind the sitting room door, and nothing could be crouching in the little gap under the stairwell. Just one more flight of stairs and please, please God, don’t let my hip give out, don’t let me fall, don’t let me stumble and be at its mercy, whatever it is.

  Let me out of here.

  In the narrow hall I found I was crying, but that was just the pain in my hip. Everything else was fine because Ming would be in the wood. There was nothing to cry about. He’d said he’d meet me so he would; Ming never broke his word. The old artillery shell with the walking sticks was right by the door: I grabbed a stout ash stick as I paused, backpack over one shoulder and Keyser Soze spitting in his cage, then prised open the front door with an elbow. I could use the stick to beat Keyser Soze to death. Only joking.

  I almost tumbled down the step in my rush to be out of there, and then I was out in the air, dizzy with relief. It was my imagination, that was all: my stupid fantastical mind inventing monsters when there were more than enough of those on the streets. I felt like a madwoman and I knew I must look like one, dusty from demolished homes, sweaty and dirty, crying with pain (and only pain), walking stick in one hand and cat in the other. I had a vague notion that people were crossing the street to get out of my way but that was fine with me. Really. A bag lady at fifteen. Wait till Ming saw me: he wouldn’t stop laughing till I elbowed him in the diaphragm.

  In the ghost wood I used the stick to swipe the webs aside, and I wasn’t even afraid when spiders catapulted onto me. Ming wasn’t here yet, or he’d come a different way; otherwise he’d have broken through already. That was okay. I’d wait for him. He’d be so proud of me when he knew I’d got through the spiders with no fuss at all. Keyser Soze had curled up in a big spitting ball of resentment, and I was trying not to swing him too much as I walked. Really, I was.

  I walked right past our pine log. You might expect Ming to be there, but I knew he’d go further into the wood. Okay, I might have had a notion he’d meet me on the log, that he’d be sitting there grinning up at me through his untidy fringe, but as soon as I saw it, Mingless, I knew I’d been silly. Of course he’d go further in, down towards the river. That was where all our recent adventures had taken us. Besides, hadn’t he asked me to swear on the Armies of Riverworld? That was a coded message. He’d meet me beside the river. Where we’d lain buck-naked in the summer sun, river water evaporating from our skin, his arm around me. Obviously.

  I stumbled down the steep slope and dumped the walking stick on the rough ground, exclaiming with exasperation as I rubbed my hip. I hoped he was going to hurry up. I sat down in the grassy hollow. I sat and stared at the river, boiling and brown, the racket of it not lessening as the light did. I waited until the day dimmed and the trees blurred and the further edges of the wood faded into the twilight. I waited until all birdsong died, until Keyser Soze growled and grunted and fell asleep, a furball of hatred.

  I waited until I knew at last that Ming wasn’t coming. Then I began to cry.

  • • •

  An hour later I still didn’t know what to do about Keyser Soze. I had some mad idea about releasing him into the wild, and I even started to hum Born Free, shakily and off-key, and fiddle with the catch of his pet carrier.

  He slitted his amber eyes and curled back his lip to show his needle teeth. You daft cow, he said in my head. I’m not wild, I’m not even feral. But I’ll be bloody cross if you dump me in a haunted forest to fend for myself. In fact I’ll probably have you killed.

  I sniffed, laughing and crying as I stuck one finger thr
ough the wire and poked at his scabby head in an effort to stroke it. You’re all there is, I told him, I’d better keep you. And I’m all you’ve got, so you’d better be nice to me, gangster cat. You’ll be wanting a liberal hand with the Kite-Kat Morsels.

  A dry branch cracked behind me and I jerked my head round. It wasn’t dark yet; the sky between the branches was unbleached denim, a nail trimming of moon hanging with Venus above me. For the first time since I’d entered the wood, it occurred to me to be afraid. Keyser Soze’s threatening growl was silenced and he flicked one bitten ear back. Trying to stand up in his cage, he could only crouch on whatever a cat calls his hunkers. A brief breeze moved in the pine branches and was still. Another branch creaked, dry pine needles gave a breathy crunch underfoot, and I knew I was not alone in the wood.

  I’d left the walking stick five yards back but I grabbed hold of the nearest boulder and used that to lever myself upright. I made myself stand and turn. Please God please God please God. Oh, please let me see greenish eyes through blond hair that needs cutting. Please let me see a flashing grin, even if half his teeth are missing. Please, God. By all the white hair on your chinny-chin-chin –

  ‘Where did you put him?’

  You know when you run water onto ice? That’s how that voice cracked the silence.

  ‘What did you do with him?’

  ‘Who?’ I could barely speak. As I took a step backwards, Keyser Soze extended a paw out of his cage to dig a needlepoint claw into my ankle. I gasped in shock.

  ‘You know who.’

  I could barely see in the woody dusk, but I knew that voice.

  ‘Tell me what you did with him,’ said Jeremiah.

  He was nothing but shadows and navy twilight, but I could see his movement, feel his breath contaminating the wood like death. He moved through the trees so that I had to turn, trembling, to keep track of him.

  ‘Are you on your own?’ I whispered.

  ‘The others got bored.’ There was a sneer in his silky hiss. I’m sure he meant it to be threatening, but it made him more human to me, and I breathed easier.