by Frances Vick
David remained in this mercifully empty world, shocked, numbed, knowing that this was not True Calm, but Terror Calm. He’d spent his life watching from the sidelines, feeling that, by watching, by learning the rules, he was Mastering The Situation. He didn’t have to get involved because he already knew how everything worked. Now, crouching in this cold, miserable park, he understood just how childish he’d been. He had no control over this, no power, no… guts. He’d watched Jenny be bullied, attacked, intimidated and he’d done nothing. He could have… run at the man, kicked him… or… hit him with a brick, or… something. He could have been a man about it.
He was ashamed of himself.
He made himself get up, cross the road. He picked up as many of the scattered photographs as he could, stuffing them in his pockets. Some had stuck to the mud like dead leaves, some had partially fallen down the drain. The album itself had been squashed flat by traffic, but he picked that up too, hugging it close and heavy in his arms, like an injured pet.
All the way down the hill, through the market, back to the station his mind yammered manupmanupmanup.
On the train he brought out the photographs… Jenny as a baby. Jenny in an unfamiliar school uniform – smiling stiffly to hide her crooked eye tooth. Jenny on a swing, a beautiful blur, a younger version of her mother behind, caught off guard, a cigarette close – too close – to the child’s face. The mother and another woman – slim, coarse-looking – drinking amber liquid from novelty shot glasses. The man, THAT man, standing before the door of The Fox, smirking at the camera, wearing the same hat. David looked into his eyes, feeling strangely as if the man was staring back, as if they were communicating. He shivered, stuffed the photos back in his pockets.
It was late when he got back home, but no one noticed him come in, thankfully. Mother and Tony might still be trying the landlord’s patience at the Rose and Crown, and Dad was probably already asleep.
In his room, he lit a candle, put a towel down on the carpet, and arranged the photographs on it. Then he stripped off his clothes and sat naked, cross-legged on the floor, closed his eyes, breathed deeply, listening to their story.
It was the saddest story he’d ever heard.
Then he opened his eyes, looked at the pictures, arranged them into the right order – not chronological order, but the order of their importance. After an hour, the photographs formed a triangle – at the bottom, those muddy pictures of family friends, the thin lady with the coarse face was in most of them. Then Jenny took over – Jenny as a baby, as a toddler, at school, alone on a beach, among a crowd of blurred adults on a bus, sitting on a bar stool.
There was only one picture that didn’t fit, and that was the one of The Man. Marc. He didn’t want to look at that again, but he had to.
Evil.
Evil flowed from him.
He placed this photo on a sheet of paper and shifted it away from the others – its own little island of contained contagion.
But still David’s naked flesh shivered as the man watched, as the man leered. Those eyes.
David slowly dragged ‘Precious Memories!’ from under his bed, took out Francis’s compass, still marked with blood, picked up the photo, and sat at his desk. The man’s evil eyes seemed to mock him, seemed to dare him. But David, relaxed now, had all the power. Slowly, he prodded them out with the tip of the compass, poking them into skull-like cavities that took up a third of his face. Then he outlined them with a gold marker until Marc couldn’t see him any more.
He took the remaining photos to the bathroom, dabbed the mud off them as best he could, wrapped them in a towel, and brought them back to his room. They lay next to his bed, like a swaddled baby, close enough to touch, close enough to hear. They’d seep into his dreams, and he’d wake up knowing just what to do.
42
The next day, at school, David’s nerves sang with her proximity. Only three seats away in History. Two in Geography. After the Francis Brennan incident, she’d been put in another Maths group, but he still managed to pass her in the corridor, close enough to see that her hair hadn’t been washed, that there were ashy sleepless smudges under her eyes. Her shirt, buttoned up to the top of her neck, was held firmly with her school tie, and David wondered if there were bruises to hide. Perhaps when Marc had pinned her to the wall, he’d injured her? He overheard Jeanine Finney asking if she was OK? ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying, but you look awful.’ Jeanine enjoyed telling people prettier than her that they looked awful… Jenny had answered, but he couldn’t catch the soft burr of her voice to tell if she was hoarse.
He knew that she walked through the graveyard on the way home from school, so he ran ahead at the end of the school day, and loitered in the church portal, waiting, until he saw her pink coat, a splotch of cheerful colour, coming through the gate. She was walking slowly while rooting through her bag. He closed his eyes, breathed slowly, let his body and thoughts dissolve, and when he opened them again, she was almost in front of him, and he knew what to do.
‘Lose something?’ He didn’t say it loudly, but she jumped back.
‘Jesus!’
He supposed he must have given her a shock, coming out of the dark doorway like that. ‘Sorry! Didn’t mean to scare you. Have you though? Lost something?’ And he looked directly at her.
Up close, alone, she almost killed him. Her eyes were a strange tawny colour, only a little darker than her hair and fringed with sooty lashes. That skin, faintly pinkened in the cold. The ruddy full mouth. David, staring, tried not to stare.
‘What?’ Her voice was husky, slovenly.
‘You’re,’ he pointed at her searching fingers, still in the bag, ‘looking for something?’
‘Yeah, I left a… book. Somewhere.’
There was a pause. Was she talking about the photo album? Was this her way of telling him she knew he’d followed her that night? God this was exciting! This was Significant!
‘What book? A library book?’ He thought it best to go along with her little game.
‘Yeah.’ Her fingers stopped fidgeting in the bag. She pulled the strap further up her shoulder and stood straighter. ‘Art. Well, not art. Photography.’
The photo album! She was talking about the photo album! His head felt hot. He closed his eyes and wobbled on his heels.
‘Are you feeling OK?’ she asked.
‘Yes. No, I mean I was out last night and I think I got a bit of a cold, that’s all.’ He opened his eyes, blinked significantly.
‘Yeah, me too,’ she answered. And she blinked too. She blinked too! Did that mean she’d seen him? Did that mean they could drop all this cutesy hinting and talk properly? He searched her face for clues, saw nothing he could be absolutely sure of, decided to play it safe.
‘Can I help you find it? The book, I mean?’
She seemed startled. Then she smiled, relaxed. ‘You don’t know what it looks like though,’ she said.
Man up man up man up. He held out his hands about twelve inches apart. ‘It’s about this big?’ Her face told him nothing. He went on. ‘Black? With, like, a gold pattern on it?’
There was a long pause. ‘No,’ she said.
David could almost feel himself deflating. ‘Oh.’
‘It was, like, about migration?’ She did that upwards inflection at the end of the sentence? Everything was a question? Jeanine did this too. So did David when he wanted to appear normal. Jenny was better than that. David felt the beginning of a headache.
‘Migration?’
‘Displaced families after war. That sort of thing.’
Now they were back on firm ground! Families moving, war, displacement. He spoke carefully. ‘Serious stuff.’
She squinted at him. ‘Yeah. Anyway—’
‘So, you were out last night, yes?’
She looked him right in the eye and smiled. ‘Yep.’
He smiled back. ‘Me too. A friend needed help with her history homework.’ He beamed inwardly. God, he was good at this.
&n
bsp; Her posture shifted. She was about to leave. ‘OK, well I better—’
A little desperately he pointed at the school insignia on her blazer. Acta Non Verba on a shield of gold. ‘D’you know what that means?’
‘What, this? No.’ She smiled at him quizzically. ‘What’s it mean then?’
‘It’s Latin. It means “Action not Words”.’
She smiled again, and nodded. ‘I like that,’ she said.
‘Me too,’ he said.
‘OK, then, bye!’ She gave him a little wave.
‘Bye!’ He waved back cheerfully.
It had all gone perfectly.
History. Family. Conflict. It was subtle, but undeniable – she knew he had her pictures and she wanted them back. David wouldn’t just give them back though – he’d clean them, arrange them and present them in just the right way, in just the right sort of box.
Back at home he took a desultory look on eBay, but bidding on something unseen felt risky; it might get lost in the post, or Tony might intercept it, open it, say something snarky, and ruin the whole thing. He didn’t want to buy some piece of Amazon tat out of desperation either… He wouldn’t know if it was the right sort of box until he held it in his hands, but he didn’t have time to properly research shops, get to the city, find the perfect thing, bring it home… it would all take too long, and he really wanted to get this done today. He had to. She’d asked him to.
A jewellery box would be perfect. Mother had three, but they were all in her room and would surely be missed. Could he make one? His memory drifted towards his only attempt at Art – a disastrous papier mâché Christmas decoration in the shape of a snowman that Tony had – accurately – said looked more like a penis… No. He couldn’t trust himself to make a box. His mind ran around the house, into the cupboards, the attic, the conservatory, but there was nothing that was right. As a last resort, he decided to look in the summer house. Tony probably had a box. He must have a box; he had so much stuff in there, and one little box wouldn’t be missed. Even if it was, there was something definitely… attractive about the idea of poking about in Tony’s things, stealing from him. And so, once Mother and Tony had left for their traditional Friday drinks at the Rose and Crown, David crept into Tony’s lair.
The summer house was… frightening. David had never been inside it before, never accepted Tony’s slightly ironic invitations to ‘have a spot of tea’ with him. He knew it was cluttered – but now he could see that it was more than cluttered – it was chaotic, offensively disorganised, and it smelled of old clothes and oil paint, the strong cigarettes he smoked and the stronger incense Tony burned to disguise the stench. It smelled furtive, alien and frightening.
The little kitchen area – a hotplate and a toaster – was greasy and crumb-covered. There were dried smears of jam on the handle of the kettle. Ashtrays abounded, but the floor was still dotted with cigarette butts. David shuddered. Everything teetered on the brink of collapse, like a snapshot of an earthquake in motion, and he wanted to run. He wanted to be sick. Man up man up man up and THINK though… This was his quest, and quests were never easy, were they? So, keeping up his mantra, trying to ignore the greasy dirt collecting under his fingernails, he held his nerve, knowing he’d not only find a box, he’d find the box. He was meant to because it was a Significant thing. He started searching the dimly lit piles of possessions, feeling the panicky anger at the lack of order and logic recede, feeling… adult.
It took an hour, but he did eventually uncover the box, jammed under the chaise longue next to an unopened box of artists pastels and a suspiciously crusty Kleenex. When he prised it out, he recognised it as part of a present Mother had given to Tony the year before – an oblong, black lacquered box, tapering at the base and delicately inlaid with mother-of-pearl and filled with nicotine patches. Tony had laughed, made a show of trying to quit for a while, but was soon back on the fags. The box was damaged now and some of the inlay had fallen out. Opening the lid, David saw that there were cigarette burns inside it; Tony used it as an ashtray. Typical. That was typical, wasn’t it? Tony was such a smug little sponger. He took Mother’s heartfelt gift and ruined it, just like he deliberately messed up the summer house, the garden (all churned earth and litter), just like he’d ruined their standing in the village – damaged Father’s reputation, his self-image. David knew people joked about Tony and Mother, and knowing this made him burn with shame. The only person Tony hadn’t damaged was David; David was too strong to bend and too clever to break. That’s why Tony hated him. It was bound to come to a head one of these days… but David would win then, too, he knew, and Tony would be driven away, banished, like an exorcised ghost. He walked back to the main house, holding the box far away from his body. The hour he’d spent in the summer house made him feel dirty all over, as if Tony’s dirt was no ordinary dirt, but a revolting resin that clung and stained. Once inside, he ran, shaking, to the bathroom and scrubbed each fingertip with bleach.
When he felt solid again, he walked slowly to his room to assess the amount of work he’d have to do.
The damage was substantial. The gouges on the top of the box were too deep to polish out and David didn’t have any black paint to cover them, so he improvised by making the smaller scratches into flying birds, incorporating what was left of the mother-of-pearl inlay as part of their wings. He turned the largest scratch into an elongated ‘J’ for Jenny. Carving carefully with the needle of the compass he’d stabbed Francis with; using his special gold marker (the same one he’d circled Marc’s eyes with) to carefully fill in the ‘J’ and the wings, he was pretty proud of himself. Art wasn’t his strong suit, perhaps the wings were a little crooked, and the ‘J’ a little long, but, after all, he wasn’t going for realism. No, the more he looked at it, the prouder he felt about the way the birds flanked the ‘J’ for Jenny, as if guiding her from the black to a new era… perhaps he should carve a sun in the corner? To make it more obvious? He closed his eyes and tried to sink into her mind. Discovering the present on the doorstep. The black and the gold – strong colours – respectful colours. He opened his eyes. No. No sun. A sun would be too overstated. Leave it.
He lined the inside of the box with the piece of red velvet he’d kept in ‘Pending’ (now he knew why he’d kept it!). He allowed himself to keep two photographs: one of Jenny as a baby, and the other with the now eyeless man in the hat. A third – a woman in brown, out of focus and unidentifiable, he kept aside on grounds of quality. He tied the rest of the photos together with a red ribbon from one of Tinker’s old toys, placed them reverently in the box, and sat back, happy, tired, but not finished, because now he had to deliver it, and it had to be handled perfectly.
By the time he’d finished customising the box, it was 10 p.m. He cycled to Jenny’s house but, halfway there, it began to rain heavily and, stupidly, he’d left without a waterproof jacket. The rain dripped down his collar, through to his neck, his chest. His jeans clung wetly to his thighs, and his gloveless hands, clenched on the handlebars, ached with cold.
When he arrived, he could see that Jenny was in. Her bike was propped up against the house and draped in bin bags to protect it from the weather. This was perfect. He could put the box on her saddle where only she was bound to find it, and the bin bags would keep it dry…
He circled away, back down the bend of the road, stashed his bike behind some bins, and made his way to her house on foot, being careful to keep to the shadows, and walking on the grass to soften his steps – accidentally stepping into a puddle, soaking both trainers. He took the box from his backpack, kissed it reverently, and placed it, carefully, on the saddle, gazed at it for a moment, and then replaced the covering and backed away. If only there was a way he could be there to see her face when she discovered it! But it couldn’t be done without her seeing him. He’d have to settle for coming back early in the morning, hiding at the end of their garden, and hope that he’d be able to catch what she was saying.
On the way home, the rain t
urned to sleet. By the time David was wheeling past the Rose and Crown, he was shaking with cold. Back in the safety of his room his head felt hot and his legs were cramped. Was he getting ill? He couldn’t afford to get ill… He stared at himself in his mirror, telling himself that illness wasn’t an option. Man up.
He slept badly though, waking, shivering with cold, sweating with heat, and he slept through his alarm, set for 6 a.m., and woke instead at 10, feverish and clammy. Late, he was late! What if she’d left the house by now? He pulled on the previous night’s damp clothes, put on his trainers, grimacing as his feet sank into the warm, waterlogged sponge. No time for breakfast, no time for anything. He put on his father’s tweed jacket, hopped on his bike, and felt the jacket’s warmth lie heavy against the fabric of his shirt, itself already damp with sweat. This humid, fetid layer of air enveloped him, heavy as a shroud.
43
Jenny’s mother was standing by the open kitchen window, blowing smoke. ‘I don’t know what you’re so worked up about—’
‘Mum, fuck’s sake! Come on!!’ Jenny shouted then. ‘How do you think they got here?’
There was a silence. ‘Well I don’t know. I don’t know, but—’
Jenny raised her voice further. ‘Oh my GOD! They came from him. He brought them here. In a fucking coffin! That means he knows where we live!’