Kid Alone

by Simon Mason

  Singh sat thinking, as still and lonely in his bare room as the tiny white gurdwara standing against the opposite wall. At last he took out his phone.

  “Robert? Singh here. Raminder Singh … Yes … No, I’m still waiting for a date … Thank you. Robert, I wonder if you can do me a favor. Just an introduction. I’d like to get in touch with the liaison officer at a security facility near Heeley called Firetown.”

  Meanwhile Garvie Smith was lying on his bed in the flat in Eastwick Gardens staring at the ceiling. He had looked inside himself and found there the thought that he was difficult, that he did not understand people or care about them, that he was antisocial and selfish. Singh had directed him to these thoughts, but they had been put there by a Polish girl with an unnervingly direct manner.

  As he lay on his bed he frowned.

  He had to do the right thing. He knew that already. He just wasn’t sure anymore what that was.

  Three days passed. On Friday he stayed all day at school and in the evening studied chemistry. On Saturday he studied Advanced Math. On Sunday he found his physics course book, missing all year, and read for the first time about energy, waves, and the origins of the universe, none of which turned out to be that interesting. It rained on Sunday night, but by eight o’clock in the morning on Monday it was already bright again. Five Mile shone in the sun; the kitchen at 12 Eastwick Gardens was prickly with warm, dusty light. Garvie sat at one side of the breakfast table sucking the end of a pen and reading Explaining Physics, and his uncle sat on the other side, drinking tea from a mug and watching him.

  “What time does it start exactly?” Uncle Len asked again.

  “Eleven. I told you.”

  “And where does it—”

  “The gym.”

  “And how long does—”

  “Couple of hours.” Garvie looked at his uncle. “Relax. You wouldn’t want to make me nervous.”

  His uncle grunted. “I couldn’t make you nervous if I tried. Your problem isn’t nerves. Your problem is turning up.”

  “I’ll turn up.”

  “You’ll turn up this time, because this time I’m driving you there.”

  Garvie went back to his textbook. He turned a page. Yawned.

  His phone rang and his uncle looked at him suspiciously as he answered it.

  “Yeah?”

  Singh’s voice said, “Garvie?”

  Garvie looked back at his uncle, his face adopting a deadpan expression.

  “Yeah.”

  “Is your mother there?”

  “No.” Garvie kept his eyes on his uncle’s.

  “Your uncle?”

  “No.”

  “I need to speak to one of them.” Singh hesitated. “I have some urgent information.”

  Garvie mouthed “Sorry” at Uncle Len, and mimed someone talking with his hand.

  Singh hesitated again. “This morning Magee skipped bail. It’s imperative that you don’t—”

  “Interesting,” Garvie said.

  There was a pause. “It’s not ‘interesting,’ it’s—”

  “Interesting you’re still trying to work it out, I mean. Thought you’d given up.”

  Singh said crossly, “This is nothing to do with what you said to me last night.”

  Still staring at Garvie, Uncle Len cocked his head to one side, as if trying to hear the conversation, and Garvie said into the phone, “That’s great, then. But you’re going about it the wrong way.”

  “What?”

  “Hertz is a measurement of frequency.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Sound waves. You know. Some people hear more than others. Just like they see more. Top note on a violin, for instance.”

  “You’re not making sense.”

  “Hints, threats, messages left on a phone. Can’t get out of the way if you can’t hear the train coming.”

  “What?”

  “I’m just saying. Take your example. If the note is 440 hertz, there are 440 sound waves per second, and if they travel at a speed of 340 meters per second, obviously the wavelength is 0.773 meters. See you later.”

  He hung up, and Uncle Len opened his mouth, and Garvie said, “Smudge. Got bogged down in waves and radiation. That boy worries too much.”

  Before Uncle Len could comment on Smudge’s level of anxiety, Garvie’s phone rang again, and he frowned as Garvie answered it.

  “Yeah?”

  Zuzana’s voice said, “Garvie?”

  Garvie kept his eyes on his uncle’s.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s Alex,” Zuzana said. “He has gone. We had an argument. The same as the other arguments but worse. He said he knew who to blame. Then he went.”

  Garvie considered this. “Why are you telling me?” he said.

  “I know what you think. Because of what we talked about. But this is not normal behavior of Alex. You do not know. Alex is your friend, but I hope you think a little of me too. Do you?”

  He thought about this for a moment. “That’s a hard one,” he said at last. “Let me think.” He watched Uncle Len making angry gestures at the clock and Explaining Physics. “It’s like this,” he said. “Strong forces of attraction between particles in solids. They don’t move around much. With gases it’s the other way round: weak attraction, random behavior.”

  “What? Why do you tell me this?”

  “The way to remember it is that it’s the opposite of people. With people it’s strong attraction, random behavior.”

  “Why are you talking in riddles?”

  “Exactly,” Garvie said. “Oh, and good luck.” He hung up. “Felix,” he said to his uncle. “Stuck on solids and gases.”

  “You get a lot of calls about studying,” Uncle Len said with a skeptical look. “I didn’t know your friends were so studious.”

  “We’re all just trying to do our best,” Garvie said.

  “What I don’t understand is why they call you.”

  Garvie’s phone rang a third time and Uncle Len shook his head in bewilderment. “Good lord,” he said. “They really must be desperate.”

  Garvie frowned at the phone before answering.

  “Yeah?”

  His whole body seemed to frown as he listened.

  “Yeah,” he said again. And then, “Do you?”

  If Uncle Len hadn’t gone over to the window he would perhaps have noticed something odd in the way Garvie held his phone, the way he turned slowly away so his impassive face was hidden.

  “Why would I do that?” he heard Garvie say.

  There was a long silence.

  “Why me?” Garvie said. “No,” he said. Then: “Yeah. Fair enough.” Finally: “All right, then.”

  There was another long pause after that in which Garvie quietly hung up, counted to three, and shouted suddenly into the phone,

  “Nine? What do you mean, nine? It’s eleven, isn’t it? All right, all right. I’m on my way.”

  At once his uncle was standing electrified at the kitchen table. “What?” he said. “What’s the matter?”

  Garvie was stuffing things into his schoolbag. “Got the time wrong. The exam starts in, like, ten minutes.”

  “What?”

  “I know. This is an emergency.” Garvie glanced up at him. “Thank God you’re here to drive me. I only hope,” he added, “it means you can use the siren.”

  Magnetic bubble light and siren doing their frantic thing on top of Uncle Len’s unmarked car, they sped out of Eastwick Gardens and into Pilkington Driftway. They swerved into Bulwarks Lane, slewed onto Pollard Way, burned down Town Road, whipped up Wyedale Road, and drew up with a final electronic whop in the driveway at Bottom Gate. It was two minutes to nine.

  Garvie pressed his uncle’s arm and got out.

  “Thanks, man. I enjoyed that.”

  “One thing before you go,” Uncle Len called after him. “Remember to use all the available time. You might think you can’t answer a question, but if you just give it—”
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  But Garvie had already set off up the driveway toward C Block and the gym beyond.

  “Good luck, then!” Uncle Len called out of the car window at Garvie’s retreating back. He reversed onto the street, shaking his head.

  Head down and frowning, Garvie walked rapidly past C Block and past the hall, pausing only to sling his bag into a corner of the yard, past the gym and along the driveway to Top Gate, and out onto the street again. Then he began to run. He disliked running. He ran in pain down Claremont Street back to Bulwarks Lane, and past the shops until he came to the taxi stand, where he at last allowed himself to smile. For once he was in luck.

  Abdul saw him coming and pulled himself off his cab and greeted Garvie with his usual daft grace, kissing him on both cheeks, smiling sweetly, and touching his fingertips to his breast.

  “My Garvie man! How is, how is?”

  “Is in pain, Abdul. I had to run here. And I’ve got to get to a place in Brickhouse sharpish.”

  “Brickhouse? Is no nice place.”

  “I know. Can’t be helped.”

  “Is plaisir, then, my Garvie man. Come. We go quick quick.”

  Garvie gave him the address and they drove down Bulwarks Lane onto the highway and south past the sewage plant. Abdul smiled at Garvie in the rearview mirror. His smile was rich, deep, white, and almost alarmingly big. He was fond of the boy, and even fonder of his mother, who had sorted out his visa for him when he’d arrived from Morocco.

  “My Garvie man,” he said. “You go see friend in Brickhouse?”

  Garvie considered that. “Could be a friend, Abdul,” he said. “You never know. Or maybe he’s just going to kill me.”

  Abdul nodded vaguely and continued to smile. Privately he considered the boy a dunce. But there are places for dunces in the world, after all.

  “We go quick quick,” he said, “so you meet your ami nouveau.”

  They came off the highway by the big furniture showrooms and drove up the hill, past the crematorium, into the ramshackle slumlike maze of Brickhouse, one of the oldest districts in the city, now dilapidated and shabby.

  Garvie sat back in his seat, watching brick strips of houses go by, thinking about the phone call earlier. He’d half expected Magee to get in touch with him, but not so soon. Something must have frightened the man. Thoughtfully, he went over the conversation again in his head. The first thing Magee had told him was that he hadn’t killed the Polish kid. “I’ve an idea who did, though,” he’d said. “You’re going to be interested, schoolboy.”

  He told Garvie to meet him, to come straightway to an address in Brickhouse, and to come alone. “Why would I do that?” Garvie had said.

  “Think I’m going to slit you? You’ll just have to trust me. This is the only chance you get.”

  “Why me?”

  “’Cause you know the rag-head. You can tell him what I tell you. He follows it up, this goes away. You don’t think I’m coming in, do you?”

  “No.”

  “There’s too much other stuff. I know how it works with those guys. I’m not going to let them twist me up. I know how to stay out of trouble. Think you’re so smart, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You can take the pain, then.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Listen to me, schoolboy. You don’t come, or you don’t come alone, it’s going to get bad. Not for you. For someone you know. I’m leaving in an hour and not coming back, so you better get here now. Understand? Now means now.”

  “All right, then.”

  He sat back in the taxi staring out the window. The streets pulled by in bits and pieces up and down the hills, houses crammed together at the sides of the roads, buckled and dark with old dirt, sidewalks littered with the broken ends of things.

  Abdul looked at Garvie in the mirror. “This place sad place, Garvie man.”

  Garvie shrugged as they drew up alongside a row of disused garages and got out. There was no traffic, no one about at all, everything was quiet, tired, as if even the houses and trees were exhausted. Abdul pointed down the road, and Garvie nodded.

  “Garvie—”

  “It’s okay, man. Thanks for the lift. I’ll give you a ding if I have to.”

  He watched as the cab pulled away, then, glancing at his watch, turned and walked rapidly past the garages up a deserted street of boarded-up brick terraces of use now only to stray dogs and graffiti artists, to the end of the row and stood there a moment, looking at the last house. It was bigger than the rest, the only house in the street not boarded up, but it didn’t look lived in. Although it was midmorning, all the curtains were drawn. Upstairs, an edge of sheet dirty as an old handkerchief hung out of a broken pane.

  He asked himself what he was doing here. The right thing? Briefly, he thought of his mother and, more strangely, of Singh, and quickly put them out of his mind.

  “It’s going to get bad,” Magee had said to him. “Not for you. For someone you know.”

  It was Garvie’s last chance to call someone. Singh, perhaps. Or Zuzana. He took out his phone and considered for a moment before punching in a number, and waited, listening. When the message had ended he spoke briefly. “Alex, mate. Give it up. Call me now.” Then he kicked his way forward through litter and weeds and tried the front door. Just as Magee had said, it wasn’t locked, and he pushed it open and went inside.

  He knew straightaway that something was wrong. The house felt like a fake. The smell of damp ash, the leaves and litter on the bare floorboards, the wallpaper peeling in tongues from the walls—they all seemed to be hiding something. The silence wasn’t silence but the hush of the house holding its breath. He held his breath too but the house didn’t drop its guard. Ignoring it, he padded down the hall, peering through doorways into big, broken-down rooms filled with the remains of furniture—chairs with missing backs, a table with a stoved-in top, cupboards without doors—and at the end of the hall he found the door to the cellar under the stairs, as Magee had told him, and opened it onto darkness below. A different smell came up to him, earth and rottenness. After a brief search he found a light switch and the stairwell flickered weakly into view, a narrow flight of bare-board steps down to a miniature wooden door. Holding his breath, he listened again, but the house gave nothing away; there was no sound except for his own pulse thumping in his head. So he went down the steps to the door at the bottom, pushed it open, and stood there hunched, peering through.

  “Mart?” he called, and his voice sank at once into darkness like a stone into water. There was no light switch he could find; the basement in front of him was a dim shadow, windowless, with a concrete floor and things in corners barely visible. Against one wall he could make out a rack of metal shelving, against another a mattress surrounded with the litter of packets and food. In the wall at the far side was a smaller doorway, open, low and narrow, almost hidden in darkness. In that darkness there was something lying on the ground.

  “Mart?” he called again.

  Looking about him, he went quietly across the dark room toward the doorway, and when he was halfway there the light in the stairwell behind him was switched off and everything went black.

  He said nothing, made no sound.

  In utter darkness he stood still, listening. He heard three things, all at the same time. From behind him a noise like breathing, but looser and angrier, with a rattle to it like a plastic bag in a breeze. A sudden crash upstairs: a door kicked in or window blown out, and footsteps pounding in the hall above. And, in the immediate darkness, a slow blurred swirl of almost-silent and invisible movement coming toward him. For a half second he had the impression, for no rational reason, of someone smiling at him in the dark. Then one of the basement walls seemed to swing loose and slam into him, a ton of brick and masonry, and he was on the ground, his bones shaken loose, the breath crushed out of him, in his ears jumbled bits of shouting and his own blood stamping like footsteps, and before he could move the wall fell on him again with an annihilating thum
p and squashed him small as grit.

  He wasn’t Garvie anymore, he was a broken bit of the room; he shared its pain—the pain of the dusty concrete floor, the pain of a corner of mattress, of a fallen metal shelf, all flicking in and out of the darkness like pokes in the eye. Then the pain of electric light brought him back to his body curled in agony on its side, exposed to the world like a fish on a slab.

  He mewled.

  “Don’t move,” a voice said.

  He tried to move and his stomach tore itself open and he retched sideways into the dust, his head buzzing with the effort.

  He felt invisible, urgent fingers on his head, face, shoulders, and heard the voice again: “Don’t, I said.”

  Slowly the dizziness faded; the room put itself back together, left Garvie behind, lying there with his cheek pressed against the floor. Focusing, he saw a man’s black rubber boot and with a groan rolled onto his back and looked up at Singh.

  “Don’t speak,” the Sikh said.

  “What are you doing here?” Garvie said in a choking whisper.

  Singh made an exasperated face. He was wearing his white pajamas and a silk black headscarf knotted at the top, and he crouched by Garvie and felt the boy’s pulse and peered into his eyes.

  “The question,” he said as he worked, “is not what I am doing here. It is what you are doing here.”

  Garvie managed a gritty smile. “You’ve gone rogue,” he said in a dusty croak. “Knew you had.”

  Singh said nothing to that. He examined Garvie’s shoulder.

  “Can you move your arm? How do you feel?” He was running his fingers over Garvie’s ankles. “Can you stand?”

  Garvie stood and quickly sat down again. Singh continued to check him over. After a while Garvie realized he could talk again.

  “How did you know where to come?” he asked.

  Singh hesitated. “I have a friend in the center’s data bank. I don’t think he fully realizes the nature of my suspension.”

  “Handy. And I thought you didn’t do friends. But I don’t suppose he had this address on file.”

  “Of course not. With the information he gave me I took a trip to a security facility near Heeley called Firetown. Sit still, please.” He continued to examine Garvie as he spoke. “You see, I couldn’t understand why Magee had come here after his release. Why here, not somewhere else? At Firetown I met one of the men he had shared a cell with, a man named de Clerk. He and Magee used to talk about what they’d do after they got out.”