Silent Children Read online

  "I'll call now," Leslie said. Her enthusiasm deserted her as soon as her mother rang off, but she dialled the number that, however much she resented it, she found readily available in her head. The phone hadn't finished ringing twice when a breathless voice demanded shrilly "Hello?"

  "Hello, Charlotte. Is Roger there?"

  The phone emitted a clatter that suggested it had been flung away. "Mummy, it's Roger's old wife," the eight-year-old shouted across at least one large room.

  The phone took its time about speaking again. "Leslie. How are you? How's your business?"

  "Fine."

  "I'm very glad to hear it," Hilene said with a genuineness Leslie found harder to cope with than she thought insincerity might have been. "What can I do for you?"

  There was no use retorting that she'd already done a great deal more than enough. "Ian isn't with you, is he?"

  "Well, no, he wouldn't be. It's not our day for him, is it?" With so little change in her voice it was clear that her daughter had stayed in the room Hilene said "You haven't hidden your friend Ian anywhere, have you?"

  The giggles that provoked must have been accompanied by an outburst of Charlotte's vigorous shakes of the head. "No scent of him here, I'm afraid. Is there some trouble?"

  "He's at the puffing stage. Silly boy and his silly friends couldn't even wait to light up till they were away from the school."

  "Gosh, I thought we'd impressed on him how dangerous they are. Nasty smelly cigarettes. They make you ill, but you can't stop smoking once you start, so don't you ever touch them."

  Only the words, not her tone, made it clear that most of this was addressed to her daughter, and all of it felt like a rebuke to Leslie, who retorted "I didn't expect him to be there, but I thought I'd better check."

  "I'll tell Roger when he brings the car back from being fixed. Poor old thing, it's starting to show its age."

  "That gets to us all," Leslie told the younger woman, younger by only two years that weren't worth resenting, and was about to ring off when Hilene said "If you ever need to talk about Ian, please know I'm here."

  "Yes. Thank you, Hilene," Leslie said with an effort that involved squeezing her eyes shut until she replaced the receiver. She opened them when Melinda laid a soft, warm, slightly moist hand over hers. "How bad this time?" Melinda said.

  "He's wandered off to be by himself and feel the world's against him. I remember how that used to feel."

  "So he won't be with his friends you don't like at least."

  "They're locked up at school for a while. Maybe he's somewhere he doesn't want to be with anyone," Leslie said almost without thinking, and then her eyes widened as her mind did. "I know where he is," she said, and saw Melinda know it too.

  THREE

  Less than an hour later the train drew into Stonebridge Park. It hadn't quite halted when Leslie edged the door open and jumped onto the platform to dash down the ramp to the main road. No doubt her fellow commuters took her for one of themselves, in more of a hurry to get home than they were. Most of them followed her across the road into Wembley and dispersed themselves through the streets of the suburb, and before she'd crossed three streets she was alone with her hurrying footsteps.

  An airliner hauled a ragged strip of cloud across the wide blue sky above the broad red roofs. A bat patted a soft ball in some child's back garden, a lawn mower drew long deep purring breaths. Here was the house where she'd kept hearing someone in an upstairs room practising the solo part of the Trumpet Voluntary once ascribed to Purcell, each rehearsal a little improved, but the window was silent now. Here was the front drive where she'd seen a large dog and a kitten that would have fitted in its stomach lying back to back in last year's midsummer sunlight while they took turns to pant, but the concrete was deserted. The memories were awakening others she was going to have to face. Ahead was the junction with Jericho Close, and now here was its corner where the paving stones had cracked and sunk under the weight of a builder's lorry or some other vehicle, and she could see to the end of the cul-de-sac—to the house that was pretending to be as innocent as its equally whitewashed partner.

  It still looked like hers. It was the only house that had been just hers and Ian's. Her curtains still bordered the windows, and as she walked swiftly up the short quiet discreet road, her mirror framed by wooden blossom on the front-room wall greeted her with a flare of sunlight. It might have been a warning, or an indication that she ought to notice what she already had: the For Sale sign had been broken off its pole, and a curtain was swaying to a halt in the smaller of the two front bedrooms—Ian's room.

  She unlatched the gate and lifted it the half-inch necessary to prevent it from catching on the rogue fragment of the jigsaw path, and saw the For Sale sign propped against the inside of the low chunky wall, crushing a dandelion that had invaded her flower bed. She marched along the path and reached for the bell push to summon Ian. Then, wanting to discover how the house felt to her, she slipped her keys out of her handbag instead and, with a stealth she couldn't explain to herself, opened the front door.

  For a moment her hall looked as it should. The plump green carpet extended itself up the stairs, at the foot of which the phone sat on its table, though the line had been cut off for months. Her collection of wonderfully dreadful record covers, starting with Beethoven and Glenn Gould in the cab of a truck, still decorated the wall over the stairs. But the hall led past the front room and the dining room to the closed kitchen door, glossy as sweat, pale as fear. She reminded herself that Ian was upstairs and made herself pad quickly down the hall to rest one hand on the painted wood, which was chilly and slick. She pushed and felt the metal ball of the catch lose its grip on the socket with an almost imperceptible click, and the door swung inward.

  Whiteness almost blinded her: the white of the wall cupboards, the cooker and dishwasher waiting in patient silence, the tall refrigerator humming its monotonous note, the slitted blinds at the windows—the new floor. She thought concrete was floating above it until she saw it was only a fan of sunlight that was turning the dust white. She clenched her fists, and when they began to relax she ventured a step into the room.

  There was no use her pretending: she no longer had a sense of treading on a hidden grave. Nevertheless her mouth was dry, and so she crossed to the sink and lifted a glass down from the cupboard and filled it from the tap, having run that longer than she ordinarily would. She raised the glass and took a tentative sip, and then a mouthful. It wasn't just cool, it was calming, and tasted as pure as water ever did.

  She finished it as she gazed out at the back garden. Her side of the hedge was as tousled as a five-year-old's hair. At the end of the strip of lawn that was brandishing weeds at her, the umbrella of the garden table drooped like a neglected flower against the alley wall. She turned away to be confronted by the open cupboard full of items there had seemed to be no point in moving until she and Ian had somewhere else of their own to live. She was feeling altogether less compelled to retreat off the new floor than she'd expected when she heard the stair immediately below the landing emit the creak even the thick carpet couldn't hush. She set the glass down on the pine table and paced into the hall.

  Now that Ian knew he'd been heard he let his weight drop on each stair, every step a declaration of defiance. He swung himself around the end of the banister and lolled into the hall, confronting her with his thirteen-year-old bulk as though he didn't care whether it impressed her as more than a gawky object, too much of which he didn't quite know what to do with. His black school blazer with its scuffed elbows didn't help his image, nor did his reddish hair that refused to lie down no matter how much he sprayed it, and even his necklace of a tie that was dangling its strangulated knot failed to create the effect it was meant to have. He couldn't know that in him she was seeing a version of her own awkward adolescence, of the compulsion to rebel even against oneself. Perhaps he didn't realise he had Roger's broad square face and her eyes, as apparently sleepy as they were keen. She mus
tn't let any of this, nor her surge of exasperated affection at the sight of him, divert her from dealing with his behaviour. She was opening her mouth when he spoke in his new mostly deep voice. "Can we come back to live?" he said.

  FOUR

  "Will you listen to what she's proposing now, Edward." To Leslie her mother said "Sometimes I think I don't understand you at all."

  "She has to make her own decisions, Ivy," her father said, but Leslie had the impression of being discussed like a customer at the bank he managed when he added "She's old enough to live with the consequences."

  "They aren't consequences just for her. There's a child to be considered."

  Outside the picture window the expansive houses of Wealdstone paired off toward Harrow. Whenever Leslie came to it the street was as quiet as a waiter in an expensive restaurant, and now the evening had muted its sounds further while toning down the sunlight, but the quiet fell short of her parents' house, where at times it seemed no conversation was complete without the accompaniment of some tape of their old favourites. Just now John Lennon was demonstrating how several repetitions of "her" were hidden in "too," which failed to lift the concern that weighed down her mother's long face toward the mouth. "Do you hear what I'm saying, Leslie?" she said. "I hope you aren't going to retreat into one of your sulks, or you'll be having him take after you in another of the ways you've discovered you don't like."

  Leslie restrained herself to glancing at her son, who was perched on the edge of a soft fawn leather armchair, his legs in purple calf-length shorts wide apart as he leafed through an Internet magazine she could tell he wasn't actually reading. "You're being considered, aren't you, Ian? You want to move back."

  "Right," he said without looking up.

  That was the maximum enthusiasm he and his friends would let themselves betray about anything just now, but Leslie's mother took it for reluctance. "How can he," she said, leaning toward Leslie and lowering her voice, "if he knows..."

  "He does."

  Leslie's mother turned her face to him, but was apparently requiring him not to hear what she was about to murmur when he spoke. "They found a dead girl under our floor."

  "Careful with the old tongue if you don't mind," Leslie's father said, his plump ruddy face still looking for a reason to be optimistic so that he could relax at the end of the day. "Sensitive souls present, remember."

  "Thank you, Edward, but I'd like to hear it all."

  "The man who fixed our house did it. My dad's aunt's house dad gave us when she died, and when mum and dad sold their old one we had the money to do things to it."

  "And enough left over to help your mother open her business. Your father tried to do his best for everyone at least."

  Whatever rebuke that was meant to contain, Leslie ignored it for Ian's sake, and he gave a shrug of his kind of agreement with her mother's words to hurry past the interruption. "Hector Woollie was the man we got. His wife runs a home for loonies and he had some of them helping him. He used to murder kids and bury them where there was going to be concrete. Only when he buried the one in our kitchen she wasn't—"

  "We're cognisant of the facts, old chap. No need to wallow in them."

  "Let him speak up for himself, Edward."

  "One of the loonies saw a bit of her when they were putting in the concrete. We were staying here out of the mess, so we never saw. Then the loony started telling people, and his boss tried to drown him and got drowned instead. So the police brought the loony round to our house and said they'd have to dig it up, so we had to come back here again."

  "Leslie, I don't know how you can stand the way he talks," her mother said. "I thought we weren't supposed to use derogatory terms for anyone these days."

  "It's just his way at the moment, isn't it, Ian? I don't believe making too much of it will help. Anyway, look, we weren't talking about Ian to begin with."

  "No, we were discussing something else that makes as little sense to me. Isn't your house still up for sale, or is that another idea you've abandoned?"

  "I never saw anyone that was seriously interested in buying. They just wanted to prowl around the house, and I'd rather not think why. And sorry, but—"

  "Allow me the floor for another moment. We're not wholly insensitive, whatever you may think. We realise you'd prefer to be living somewhere you could call your own, and your father would be prepared to arrange a loan for you. Tell her, Edward."

  "Just until you shift the house you've got. We'd use it as collateral. It's not the kind of loan I can swing for everyone. Too little profit for the bank."

  "Thanks, dad. I appreciate it." Behind him the Beatles were finding more syllables than melody in "ride," and she couldn't help raising her voice. "Only I was going to say before, I haven't abandoned anything. We're set on moving back in."

  Her mother exhibited her open hands and let Leslie's unreasonableness weigh them down. "Whenever we have a conversation I feel as if we might as well not have had it at all."

  "I think that's a slight exaggeration, Ivy, do you?"

  Leslie's mother allowed the silence to answer for her, the Beatles having paused for breath between tracks, and then she said "Make an effort for me, Leslie. Try and help me understand."

  "I have been."

  "One more effort," she said as she might have addressed toddler Leslie on the toilet. "Give me one good reason why you insist on moving back to that place."

  This melodrama of an argument and the impossibility of avoiding such confrontations while Leslie and her son were staying here was one, along with the oppressiveness of being treated like not much more than a child, but these were among the last things Leslie could say. "Help meee," the Beatles shrilled, and she was reminded of an old film she'd once seen on television—reminded of a fly with a man's head emitting that cry while a spider reeled it in. She'd found the image both absurd and frightening, and now she had to tell herself those words had no bearing on her future. She and Ian needed to return to the only place he seemed to regard as home, where she could ride out his adolescence and do her best to bring him up without her mother's attempts to help aggravating his behaviour. She managed to reduce all that to an answer she could risk uttering, one that her father might even persuade her mother had some sense in it, given time. "It's a challenge," she said.

  FIVE

  Leslie had finished unpacking the toiletries she'd returned to the bathroom and was sharing a proprietary smile with herself—a smile that the halves of the mirror on the wall cupboard couldn't quite fit together—when the doorbell rang. "I'll see who it is," she called, and ran down the stairs that were once again hers.

  She felt the front-door latch snag, its familiar trick that no amount of oil had overcome. Janet Hargreaves from the adjoining house was on the path, wiping her lined leathery forehead with the back of one hand in a gardening glove. "I just wanted to welcome you back," she announced loudly in her hoarse cigarette-ridden voice.

  "I'm glad I am, Janet. Will you have a coffee? Ian's being mother."

  "That's a promising development, isn't it? I'd better not, thanks," Janet said, lifting one earthy boot to demonstrate the reason. "Ring the bell whenever you want a chat. I just had my old man on the mobile from some motorway services over the border, and he agrees you made the right decision, whatever anyone else says."

  "Anyone being..?"

  "Whoever they are. As Vern says, they'd own up to who they were if they were anyone worth knowing."

  "I'm lost. Who's been doing what?"

  "Don't say you haven't been seeing the Advertiser."

  "I cancelled it while we weren't here."

  "I'd have thought the estate agent might have shown you," Janet said, so obviously unhappy to be the bringer of the news that she almost took hold of her mouth with an earthy thumb and forefinger. "Shall I dig them out for you? They're in the recycling heap."

  "You're kind."

  "You'll see," Janet said and stumped off, scattering earth into the cracks of the path.


  Leslie glanced along the hall. Ian was sprawling on a pine bench in the kitchen, one elbow on the table just about holding him up, his feet drumming on the concrete as the percolator kept him waiting. Beyond the kitchen window Melinda was raising the umbrella over the garden furniture, having provided herself and her car to help Leslie and Ian move. In the distance a church bell celebrated the hushed bright Sunday afternoon that eventually brought Janet back with an armful of issues of the Wembley and Sudbury Advertiser. "You aren't in all of these, I don't think," she said as some kind of reassurance. "I'll leave them with you, shall I, and get back to my spinach."

  When Leslie saw the headline on the topmost newspaper she folded the bundle and jammed it under her arm to carry it past Ian. He was only tapping the floor with one heel now; it sounded not unlike an impatient finger. "I'll be down the garden," she said, as unnecessarily as his expression told her it was, and stepped into the spotlight of the sun.

  HOUSE OF HORROR TO BE SOLD, declared the headline, as the bundle she dumped on the garden table spread itself. Staff reporter Verity Drew summarised the history of Leslie's house and expanded the headline to a paragraph, and that had been enough to start a correspondence. "Outraged Ratepayer" demanded why the house couldn't be compulsorily purchased by the council and torn down. "Concerned of Cricklewood" suggested this might damage the adjoining property but felt the motives of anyone who bought the house deserved to be questioned. "Retired of Wembley" recommended that any profit from the sale should at least be shared with the victim's family, but "Suburbanite" went further, insisting that anyone who touched the money would be tainted and quoting the Bible to prove it. Melinda was reading each item after Leslie, muttering "Ridiculous" and "Pity they've nothing better to do" and "I hope you aren't letting this get to you, Les," when Ian made his way to them, spilling not much of the contents of two mugs of coffee. The moment he'd set the mugs on the table he swung back toward the house. "Ian?" Leslie said.