The One Safe Place Read online

  Marshall had often heard shots fired in the woods, and once he'd found bullet cases beside a path. He knew that George S.'s father had taught him how to use a gun, but would he let the boy take one out with him? Maybe he didn't know George S. had. Marshall peered over his shoulder, pain jabbing his neck, and saw a dark gun-shaped object glinting in George S.'s hand.

  Even if it was a gun he wouldn't dare shoot it at him, Marshall tried to think. They wanted to prevent him from reaching the safe ground in sight of the houses, and if he let them head him off... The prospect sent him scrambling up the bank.

  Sunlight fastened on his back. Earth dug under his fingernails and stung the quick. The strap of one sandal slid down over his heel, and he thought he'd lost the sandal. He flung up his hands as if he was surrendering, though only to seize the ridge, and missed, and skidded down the bank. "I warned you," George S. called. "You take one more step..."

  Marshall pressed the raw palms of his hands against the earth and hitched himself upward, and straightened his legs as the toes of his sandals dug into footholds so shallow he was afraid to look down, and then his head was above the ridge, insight of the lake and the rear of his house at the far end of it. He rammed his chin into the stubbly earth, and heaved himself up until his forearms were over the ridge. He levered himself onto his knees and rolled down the far side of the bank.

  He was lurching to his feet when he heard two thuds behind him, followed by a splash and a curse as Max failed to achieve the leap. Marshall only had to run, because he was within a hundred yards of the nearest house. Although there was nobody to be seen, he only had to shout for help if he needed to, assuming that the roar which the latest plane was draping over the suburb didn't blot out his voice. He sprinted through the thick grass toward the end of the fences, on the lakeward side of which someone had abandoned a length of hosepipe whose random curves gleamed black. He heard his pursuers thudding up the bank, and glanced painfully back to see George S. storm into view, brandishing the piece of wood which no longer even looked the color of a gun. Marshall put on speed, hunching his shoulders up and ducking his head to present less of a target. Then the hosepipe lifted its head and extended its forked tongue and came writhing fast at him.

  His ankles bruised each other as he stumbled backward. He heard Vic arrive at the top of the bank with a snarl of triumph and Max labour after him, cursing with ever)' breath. He couldn't let them drag him back. He launched himself at the three-foot snake, and in the moment of jumping he saw it was farther away than the canal was wide. He felt himself falter in mid-air, legs waving frantically. Then his feet snapped grass several inches beyond the snake, and kept running, but only until George S. shouted, "Run while you can, Marsh. You won't be able to run away from us much longer."

  Marshall swung around and held onto the picket fence while he filled his sandpapered lungs with air. The snake was less than a foot away from him, and stretched across the margin of the lake almost as straight as a line he might have drawn with his heel. "Yes I will," he said, and raised his voice. "We're going away today and never coming back."

  George S.'s chin wagged from side to side with frustrated rage, and Marshall burst out laughing. He didn't move when his enemy slid down the bank, spraying the grass at the bottom with dust. If George S. wanted to come for him now, let him come and take whatever consequences he stirred up. But Vic yelled, "Watch out, snake."

  George S. saw it, and skated to a halt on the grass. He brandished the piece of wood as though it was a wand whose use hadn't been fully explained to him, then pointed it at Marshall like the gun he'd wanted it to be. "Pray to die if you're lying, Marsh. And if you're not, I'll pray that worse than us is waiting for you where you're going."

  Marshall turned and walked away, refusing to be panicked into running. He didn't look back until his lungs had ceased to ache. George S. was watching from beyond the boundary of the snake while his cronies lurked behind him. "So long, Georgette," Marshall said. "Mumble away, Maximum. Hasta la vista, Victim." By now he was facing away from them and waving to his mother, who had come to their fence. The sight of George S.'s face, moving its chin like a goat chewing on frustration, had convinced him that leaving was the right choice—made it seem like the start of an adventure he couldn't begin to imagine.

  *

  Darren Fancy was cycling through traffic on one of the roads into the centre of Manchester when he forgot where he was and where he was going. A gush of sunlight through the low muddy clouds had confused him, and the rash which had broken out on the faces of the drivers made him want to rip open the wrists of his gloves to examine his own hands. He could only cycle while he tried to understand, weaving expertly between two side mirrors in fat black plastic housings and kicking another against a Volvo to give himself more room. As the electric window of the Volvo began to hum open he jabbed an open-legs sign at the driver and saw that the spots were crawling over her pudgy pale infuriated face. They were shadows of raindrops on the windscreen, but that didn't help him put any more thoughts together. The lights of the traffic signals at the junction ahead extended from red to amber and then, as if the weight was too much, dropped to green, and Darren veered in front of a Jaguar whose driver was pressing a car phone against the bottom of his turban and jerked the bicycle over the curb onto the smashed pavement. He shook his head until the earphones of his Walkman fell around his neck, but that only let the blurred sounds of the stampede of traffic at him. Then he caught sight of the sign for the probation centre and realised he was nearly home.

  He couldn't tell whether his forehead was hotter outside or in. The sun looked as though someone was trying to poke the end of a telescope through the clouds in search of him. Surely he'd already been wherever he was supposed to go. He hoisted the Benign Lumps concert into place over his ears and pedalled fast onto the waste ground occupied by workers' cabins, which was the start of the quickest way home through the council estate.

  The cabins weren't much narrower than the houses of the estate. Inside were bare metal desks with pens locked up in them, filing cabinets stuffed with paper, graphs on the walls—nothing worth breaking in for. They weren't even a challenge like the new and supposedly unbreakable park benches. A man carrying a clipboard and wearing a pen for a necklace came out of one cabin to watch Darren with an expression like the one all the teachers at secondary school turned on him, especially when they thought he wasn't looking. Darren considered performing a wheelie to spray him with mud, then contented himself with his best spit, which travelled at least twelve feet and spattered the open door of the cabin. A shout of "You dirty little—" was blotted out by the Benign Lumps as he sped off between the backyards, his teeth chattering with mirth.

  He could see over the fences by standing on the pedals, but there wasn't much to see except kitchens and back rooms repeating themselves beneath tiny bedroom windows like spyholes for watching out for the police. Where the gutters were clogged with windblown litter, the walls under them looked spongy with January rain. He saw a toddler trying to climb on a car engine covered with a tarpaulin in one yard, a needle and bloody syringe in the next, where the grass straggled like a dosser's beard. A woman toothy with several colours of plastic clothes-pegs glared out of her yard at him as he raced behind Mozart Close, a Doberman snarled at him from behind a fence of Mendelssohn. He spat over the fence and screeched left behind Haydn, feeling as if he'd become the pounding drums and the guitars and singers trying to outshriek one another, and saw several children from his old school blocking the alley ahead.

  It wasn't seeing them which made him brake—he would have enjoyed watching them scream and cower against the fence—but in the yard into which they were trooping he'd seen a white rabbit in a green hutch from his last year's classroom. Bugs was the class pet which Mrs. Morris had never let Darren look after during any of the holidays and weekends, though she used to call Darren her little ray of sunshine as if they were sharing a joke, not like any of the multitude of teachers at his new schoo
l, none of whom seemed to know or want to know him. He jumped off the mountain bike and ran it into the yard and shook the headphones off. "Eh, whosit, give us a hold of Bugs."

  "Don't, Henry. Mam said nobody but us was to."

  "Tell your sister to shut her hole, Henry. It's not yours to say who can hold it. Give the bugger here."

  The girl sidled behind the two friends she'd brought home. She was twisting a toggle of her duffel coat so hard that moisture oozed out of the cloth. "I'm getting mam."

  "You get her," Darren said over the whine and tish of the earphones. "Tell her Darren Fancy's in your yard and all he's after is a hold of Bugs, and see if she wants to get on the wrong side of us."

  All he wanted was to stroke the animal, the way Mrs. Morris had let him. His hands were remembering how soft its fur was, except that having to argue was mixing up the sensation with the muffled spiky throbbing at his neck. He ran the bicycle at Henry, and the boy backed away, tripping over the prop of the clothesline which sagged between the corners of the yard. As Henry sprawled on his arse on the concrete and began to howl like a factory siren, his sister dashed out of the gate. "I never touched him," Darren said, not for the first or the dozenth time in his life. "Don't you two be saying I did him when I never. I'm holding Bugs and then you can if you want."

  He let the bicycle drop against the fence and stooped to the hutch, tearing open the wrists of his gloves and pulling his hands free. Bugs thumped one paddle-shaped back leg and retreated into the section of the hutch that was boarded up like a derelict house. Henry's howls were making Darren's fingers feel as if he hadn't taken off the gloves. "Shut it, you twat, or I'll stick one in your gob," Darren told him, so savagely that Henry gulped himself silent, and then Darren's fingers were able to turn the wooden catches of the hutch.

  As soon as he groped into its nest, the animal fled into the larger compartment. Darren left one hand in the straw sown with hard round turds and reached around with the other to try and stroke the rabbit's ears flat, the way it kept them when it was calm. "Eh, Bugs, you know me. It's Darren from last year."

  He'd managed to flatten one ear when the rabbit struggled from under his hand and fled for its nest, then at once dodged aside, having found Darren there too, and leapt out of the hutch. Darren fell back, banging his knuckles on the wooden underside of the roof. Henry was lying on the concrete as though scared to move until he was told, but he scrabbled backward away from the rabbit, faster when Darren lunged in his direction. Then Darren's hands were around the animal, which was so large that they barely encircled its torso, and lifted it onto his chest.

  Its blunt twitching nose pushed under his chin, and he thought it was going to nestle there. Instead it dug its claws into his chest so hard he felt them through his shell suit and hauled itself onto his shoulder. It was going to leap over the fence. "Come here, you dick," Darren growled, squeezing it with all his strength. He felt its ribs crack before it wriggled out of his grasp and sprang over his shoulder, missing the fence and landing on the concrete with a loud slap.

  He'd broken it. It lay there shaking with its legs stretched out, and Darren was about to grab the evidence and shove it in the hutch when it grunted. Gathering itself, it performed a tentative hop. As he moved to head it off it hurtled past him, out of the gate.

  He couldn't run that fast. He seized his gloves from the top of the hutch and digging his hands into them, swung the bicycle away from the fence and vaulted onto it. Henry had sprinted into the alley, grabbing at his own face in dismay and stretching out his hands and grabbing his face again. One of Darren's handlebars clubbed him in the kidney, knocking him out of the way. Bugs was hesitating at the end of the alley which gave onto one of the patches of grass the planners seemed to have left because they couldn't think what else to do with the ground, and Darren thought it might feel at home on the grass. As he aimed the bicycle to send the rabbit that way so that he could ride around it until it tired, however, it dodged into an alley which led to a road which bordered the estate.

  Darren skidded after it, yelling, "Stop, you fucker." He was hoping his shout might bring someone out of a yard to head it off, except people on the estate knew better than to intervene or even to look if they heard anything like that. In seconds Bugs was at the far end of the alley, where it faltered, panting, perhaps confused by the heaps dogs had left on the pavement. But as Darren raced down the alley the rabbit dashed onto the road and froze halfway across. Darren pedalled furiously, having heard the car. He emerged from the alley just in time to see a black Rover travelling at twice the speed it was supposed to on that road. Its right front wheel struck the rabbit, and the thud turned into a muffled pop.

  The car was out of sight before Darren bumped over the curb. He made several circuits of the expanded rabbit, which was now more red than white. He was less disturbed by the mess that had spilled out of it than by the color of the innards, a duller red than they ever were in videos. He was fumbling the earphones over his ears when Henry saw him along the alley and ran toward him.

  "It's your fault, you selfish little shit," Darren hissed, and rode at Henry, feeling fast and powerful as the Rover. Henry gaped at the rabbit and drew breath for a howl, then read Darren's expression and turned tail. As he fled onto the no man's land of grass Darren was at his heels, and would have ridden him down except that Henry's mother came flustering out of her alley, a glass of what Darren guessed was gin shedding drops over her wristful of tarnished bracelets. The music hammering his ears wanted him to go for Henry anyway. Instead he veered around the boy as Henry and his mother competed to see who could make the highest noise, and sped across the sodden grass and down his alley to the front of Handel Close.

  His house was on the corner. Whenever he heard it called the Fancy house it sounded like a joke which everyone but he was afraid to laugh at. Except for having some grass that went around three sides of it, no broader than a hallway along the windowless side, it was much like any house on the estate. He lifted the gate, and the slouching fence with it, so as to open it across the cracked concrete path, and wheeled his bicycle through the mud overgrown with scraps of paper. There was just room for the bicycle among the spare bits of car in the shed. He sneaked to the back door of the house, but as the key turned in the first of the locks one of his uncles had put in, his father's head reared up beyond the window next to the kitchen. By the time Darren finished letting himself in his father was waiting in the hall, scratching the veins of his folded arms with the black crescents of his fingernails and chewing whatever had left wet crumbs in the stubble around his mouth. "Where've you been?"

  That meant before the rabbit, Darren guessed. He'd been somewhere for his father. He fumbled with the earphones, which had slipped down his neck, in case they might help him remember. "Eh?" his father shouted.

  He'd begun to pinch his eyes with one hand as if to rub them even redder and was pounding the wall rapidly as a pneumatic drill with the side of the other, which was getting ready to punch Darren. "Delivering?" Darren said.

  "I know that, you defec. What kept you?"

  "Had to wait?"

  There was nothing Darren could think of to say that would save him from being knocked down while his father was in this mood. But his father sent his bloodshot glare past him and finished chewing. "Better not do it twice," he muttered, apparently not about him, then stared hard at him. "See anyone we don't know?"

  "No?"

  After a pause during which Darren felt the music clamping itself to his neck his father said, "Well?"

  Darren tensed himself to run as his father's gaze drifted down his body, and then he realised it mightn't be the best place to punch him that his father was looking for. He tore at his wrist and succeeded in dragging off the glove so as to unzip his pocket. "Here, da. It's all here."

  "Better fucking be." His father lurched forward so violently that Darren thought he was going to punch him for luck, but only snatched the wad of crumpled grubby notes. He poked between his teeth
with one thick finger before using it to leaf through the notes, counting more or less silently. Four hundred and forty, and sixty, and eighty... He pinched his eyes harder and went through the notes again while Darren tried to sidle away unnoticed, but then his father finished counting and grimaced, not so much satisfied as frustrated at having no reason to hit anyone. Eventually he said, "Want a tab?"

  It occurred to Darren, as it seemed to have quite a few times, that those might be making the hole in his brain where his memory ought to be. "Still got some."

  "Suit yourself," his father said, stuffing the notes into the back pocket of his jeans, which he yanked up over his stained Gucci shirt before pulling the belt a notch tighter. "Just stay out. We're talking."

  "Where's mam?"

  "The old bastard pissed himself again," his father said, turning away as though Darren was no longer there, and let himself into the mutter of male voices in the back room.

  Darren retreated to the stairs in case anyone accused him of listening. Lamps which someone, probably one of his parents, must have grabbed for support hung off the walls, exposing their wires. As he hurried upstairs, peeling off his jacket that felt as soaked inside as out, he heard his mother in his grandfather's room. "See what you done, you dirty old sod.

  Should be in Bellevue with the rest of the animals." Darren listened outside the door in case there was worse to hear, but the only further sounds were his mother's dramatic groans as she lifted the old man and his grandfather groaning louder as she did, and so Darren crossed the thin rucked carpet to his room.