Silent Children Read online

  A lorry several times the size of Shaun's house rattled the insecure glass of the windows as Shaun stabbed the lock with his key on a chain with a skull. Ian was first after him into the token hall, where they had to sidle past a bicycle with one wheel missing and some bits of the furniture Shaun's father kept attempting to build so that he would have another kind of job to try for. Baz heeled the door shut as they followed Shaun into the front room, where shabby chairs faced a television crowned with a video recorder and cable box. The furniture left space only for a plasterboard bar in one corner, where three bottles of spirits hung their heads on the wall. On top of the bar a quartet of crumpled empty cans of Skol guarded the corners of a car repair manual bristling with yellow slips of paper. The boys had hardly thrown themselves into a chair each as Shaun set about switching channels when his big sister Sharon appeared from the kitchen, pushing seven-year-old Crystal ahead of her. "Someone let her sit before she spills her juice," Sharon shrilled, and more directly to her brother "They haven't kept you back at school for once, then, so I needn't rush to work."

  "Don't know what you'd have to rush for. They must be hard up, anyone who'd pay to watch you wag your arse on a table."

  "Never mind joking someone who's got a paying job, Shaun Nolan." Since she'd ducked to pat her elaborately careless heap of blonde hair in front of the mirror above the electric fire, she appeared to be addressing herself. "You wait till you finish school and you're out of work like dad."

  "At least he doesn't have men looking up his arse, and I won't either."

  "We'll see, won't we. Turn that down and let her sit before she stains her dress, and you've got to stay in with her till mum gets home." Without waiting to see if any of this was likely to be obeyed, Sharon stalked out ahead of her hot spicy perfume and was gone with a slam.

  Baz shoved himself out of his chair, writhing his shoulders as if someone might need to be punched. "Sit here," he told Crystal. "We don't want you messing your pretty white dress."

  Stu looked at the ceiling and found nobody there to observe his grin. "Not yet," he added.

  "Just park your arse there, Crys, and finish that," Shaun said, flicking through the channels. Crackpot Jackpot flashed by, and Driving Me Crazy with its harassed clown of a driving instructor, and a talk show in which teenagers were screaming and bleeping at their weepy obese parents while an audience howled and catcalled to prove themselves normal. When Crystal glimpsed Hocus Focus and the camera that magicked its owner into the scenes of its old photographs, she perched on the vacated chair before Baz could reclaim it and began to wail. "Put it back on. Mum says you have to let me see my programmes."

  Shaun switched the television off and aimed the control at his sister as though it might work for her too. "Shut that. Do it, bitch. Leave your drink if you aren't going to finish it or you won't get your surprise."

  The instant he stopped speaking Crystal's tears brought themselves to an end, reminding Ian of the girl he was expected to think of as some kind of sister. "What is it?" Crystal sniffed.

  "Wouldn't be a surprise then, would it? It's at Ian's."

  She downed half her blackcurrant juice so that its place in her plastic mug could be taken by a hollow gasp. "She said I can't go out."

  "Shar did, but she's not here. Now you have to do what I say or you'll never know what your surprise was going to be."

  She hadn't asked to visit Ian's house at all, and Ian might have been angry with Shaun for trying to deceive him, except that all four of them often said things the others were supposed either to know weren't entirely true or to find out soon enough. "It's special," he said. "It'll make you special."

  He knew that would get to her—it might have done so to him. He felt contempt for them both, a contempt that squashed his thoughts. When Crystal emptied her mug, daubing her mouth with purple juice, he grabbed her plump warm sticky hand for as long as it took to pull her out of the chair. "Wipe it," Shaun said in disgust, and Ian felt as if he were obeying as he rubbed his hand dry on his trousers while Crystal smeared her wrist with her mouth.

  The noise of the traffic swallowed the slam of the front door. The boys marched in single file across the road, Crystal in the middle of them with her hands over her ears to shut out the screech of brakes and furious blaring of horns, and into the park, a lot of green with some muddy water cutting through it, and kids walking home across it, and people taking their dogs for a shit. The slab on top of Ian's mind made his surroundings mean less than nothing to him, and sometimes he wondered if his friends felt that way too, not that he was about to ask. They crossed the park so fast that Crystal had very little breath to wail about how much further they were going, but when they reached the gates she stopped to look maltreated. "Hurry up," Shaun said, and when that didn't shift her, "or you won't see your new friend."

  "What friend?"

  "A special little girl," Ian offered, and felt a flicker of excitement reach beneath the slab as Shaun said "She wants to play with you."

  Not much was happening in the streets. Kids with keys were letting themselves in, and cartoons were uttering short bursts of words together with a good deal more noise beyond quite a few of the sets of net curtains, but otherwise the houses were keeping their occupants to themselves. The boys had hurried Crystal almost to Jericho Close when a white Astra, its back seat heaped with bags of food, cruised past them and stopped with a gnash of the handbrake. The driver's window slid down to extrude the grey curls and then the crimson-lipped determinedly tanned remainder of the head of Mrs. Lancing, who lived in the corner house. "Ian," she said.

  It wasn't a greeting so much as a summons. "What?" he just about responded.

  "Is that the little one who was making all the fuss outside your house the other day?"

  "No."

  "I hope you won't be upsetting her the way you did the other little girl."

  "Right."

  "What do you mean by that, Ian? Just you wait until I've finished speaking," Mrs. Lancing called after him. He grinned at hearing her voice rise only to find it hadn't quite enough breath, but he was even more pleased by how her comments must have improved his friends' opinion of him, though they couldn't question him in case that put Crystal off. Instead they followed him down Jericho Close to his house.

  Everyone but him stayed behind Crystal on the narrow path as he twisted the key in the lock. When he turned from pushing the door open, however, she had retreated a step and was tugging at her right-hand bunch of hair with one sticky fist. "Where is she?" she complained.

  "She can't come to the door. I said she was special."

  "What's wrong with her?" said Crystal, her mouth on the way to drooping, one sandal digging at the path. "Can't she walk?"

  "She's just asleep. You've got to wake her."

  "Why can't you?"

  "She doesn't like boys to," Ian said, and saw his ingenuity impressing his friends. As soon as Crystal ventured forward, almost leaving the sandal with its toe stuck in a jagged crack of the path, he said "Come on and I'll show you her room."

  Crystal hesitated with one foot over the threshold. He saw Stu think of pushing her into the house, and looked at him hard enough to prevent it. "Why did the woman in the car say the little girl made a fuss?" Crystal said.

  "About coming in a house she didn't know, just like you. She's used to me and my mum now. She likes it here just like you will."

  When Crystal stepped forward he felt as though his friends' admiration for his technique had given her a stealthy shove. The moment she was past the door the boys crowded after her, and Shaun shut it while Ian blocked the way upstairs. "Want a drink before you see her?"

  "You made me thirsty walking so quick."

  Her using an accusation as a demand lost her any sympathy he might have had to suppress. She followed him to the kitchen and sat where he pointed, on the bench at the far side of the table from the hall. The back door was locked, and the key wasn't in it. He watched the floor, where the shadows of her thin bare
impatient legs made the concrete or something beneath it appear restless, until Shaun and the others filled the doorway. "What am I supposed to give her?" he asked Shaun.

  "Something with water in."

  The door of the refrigerator cast a shadow like a trapdoor creeping open in the concrete. "Want some red stuff?" Ian said.

  "What is it?" Crystal said, so suspiciously that the boys in the doorway covered their mouths.

  "See what it says on it," Ian told her, and laid the bottle on the floor.

  He watched her grip the edge of the table to lean down. Her little finger touched the concrete as she took hold of the bottle by its neck and dragged it to her with a scraping of plastic that seemed to grow louder in his ears once it had stopped. She hauled herself into a sitting position and stood the bottle in front of her, but gave the label no more than a grimace for being unfamiliar. "Is it sweet?"

  "Try it and see," Ian advised, and carried the raspberry juice to the sink, where he filled a glass almost to the brim with juice before adding a splash of water. There must still be some of the little girl under the floor close to the pipes, he thought, however much of her the police had cleared away. The notion sent a shiver of excitement through him as he stooped to place the glass on the floor.

  "Stop putting it down there," Crystal protested, but leaned off the bench to reach for it, her bunches swaying on either side of her intent face. The shape of a little girl's hand swelled up out of the concrete beside the glass, then vanished as her closing hand met its shadow. Ian saw her fingers tremble as they gripped the table while she concentrated on raising the glass. He saw Baz and Stu itching to speed up the game, and Shaun scowling at them. Then Crystal had the glass and lifted it to her mouth, not spilling a drop. She continued to grasp the edge of the table as she tilted the drink into her mouth.

  Ian saw an inch of unsweetened juice vanish at a gulp, and held his breath. He watched her suck her lips in and her eyes start to water. Her head jerked up, and she tried to stand the glass on the table fast enough to give her time to reach the sink, but she was only in the process of swinging her legs off the bench when the contents of her mouth proved uncontainable, hitting the floor with a loud flat splash.

  There was a silence that emphasised how the stain was seeping into the concrete. Not until Crystal glanced up, looking ready for an argument, did Baz say "You've done it now."

  "Better say you're sorry quick," Stu advised her.

  "It wasn't sweet." When her complaint brought no response from Ian, not even a blink, she muttered "Sorry."

  "Not to him," Shaun said.

  She tugged at her hair. "Why not him? Who?"

  "The little girl," said Ian. "You've woken her up."

  Crystal tugged so hard her head began to cant as though the floor was drawing it sideways and down. "Where is she?"

  "Under where you spat. You'd better talk to her before she comes to see who spat on her."

  Crystal shoved herself in a single movement to the far end of the bench. Her heel caught an upright of the table, and her sandal flew off, slithering across the concrete toward the stain. "Don't want to," she wailed.

  "You've got to. She knows you're here."

  "If you don't talk to her she'll follow you home and get in your bed," Stu said.

  "You've got to lie on the floor," Baz said, "so you can hear her."

  "If you don't she'll come out," said Shaun, "and you won't like how she looks."

  Crystal stared at him, her mouth pulling itself out of shape and releasing a trickle of red as though she had bitten her tongue. "This is where mum and dad were talking about and they stopped when I came in," she cried.

  "Where the little girl was buried, that's right, under there, and now you're going to see her if she doesn't think you're sorry enough."

  "She's got worms for eyes," Baz assured her.

  "And her entrails are all hanging out with insects crawling on them," said Stu.

  Ian thought the last two were going too far, at least for him, though they were causing Crystal's mouth to wrench itself into progressively more interesting shapes. For him it was sufficient that the new floor and all that it was meant to conceal had grown intensely present, its whiteness vibrating, the stain gleaming like the irrepressible mark of a death. "She made your shoe come off," he said. "She made it go to her. You'd better listen so you hear her. Listen hard and you will."

  Crystal's eyes turned unwillingly toward the stain as though it, or something whose location it marked, had fastened on them. The rest of her appeared to be unable to move except for a slight quivering. Ian willed his friends not to give in to the temptation to make her jump, because he was sure that if they waited she would hear what she'd been told to hear. But he wasn't expecting to hear it—a muffled scraping like the sound of a buried finger trying to draw attention to itself.

  The concrete appeared to flutter, having grown thin as a sheet that was about to be flung off. Then, as his friends swung round to stare along the hall, Ian realised that the sound wasn't in the kitchen. He'd heard car doors slamming near the house, but there was no reason why they should have anything to do with him. He was facing the front door, which was the only course of action his friends seemed able to think of, and there was no sound in the kitchen except for a tentative whimper from Crystal, when the door swung open and a stranger stepped into his house.

  TWELVE

  "You mustn't be doing too badly if you can afford to park off Piccadilly," Leslie said.

  "I'm still trying to get my head around some things about England."

  That might include driving on the unfamiliar side of the road, and so, as Jack Lamb turned the hired Nova along Park Lane, she confined herself to directing him. An ambulance racing to the children's hospital nearly made her send him into the wrong lane at Paddington, but once they'd escaped the hot clogged fuming streets under Westway, there wasn't much for her to do except tell him to carry on. The Grand Union Canal came to find the road and swung away again, taking with it a barge brighter than a florist's display, and the car was following an elongated lorry that wagged its drunken rear at them through Kensal Green when Jack said "Say, did I offend you somehow?"

  "Not that I noticed. What makes you ask that?"

  "Just that you've been quiet for a good while, but don't let me intrude if you've got things you need to think about."

  "Nothing that won't keep. I just thought you might want to concentrate on driving."

  "Am I that scary? I've been trying to take care."

  "You're fine. I've never felt safer," Leslie said, and found she wasn't exaggerating out of politeness after all—he certainly never made her feel compelled to brake with her feet against the front of the cabin, as Roger used to whenever he saw the slightest opportunity to overtake. "So how long have you been over here? Is this your first time?"

  "First time out of the US of A for Jack Lamb, and as I said to your friend at the shop, just me, not my books."

  "Let's hope before long it's both. And by the way, I wouldn't want you to think I was laughing at you back there, just at that awful man not realising where you came from."

  "No mistaking that once I open my mouth though, huh?"

  "Not much," Leslie said, and waited while he braked as the lorry swayed left into Harlesden. "So how long has it been?"

  "The cops would be after me in California," he said, and she had to deduce the offence was having flashed his headlamps to invite a woman in a Mazda to steer across his path. "Forgive me, you were asking how long ..."

  "How long you've been in the old country."

  "Got you. Just a few months. I'm staying with some friends in Hampstead that I met at a concert in the Bowl. That's as close as some of us Hollywood types get to your kind of music."

  "I should think that must be pretty close."

  "You wouldn't if you'd heard half the audience applaud whenever they thought the symphony was over. At least I knew better than that. It was apologising to Charles and Liz because I'd hea
rd they were English that started us getting acquainted."

  "So are you in films? That's to say, are your books?"

  "I'm not a performer in either sense, I have to tell you. Wes Craven's office asked my agent about one waste of paper, but that's the only query I ever had a name for."

  "It's researching your new one that's brought you to England, then."

  "It's the people who are making me want to stay."

  "Tell me if I'm asking too many questions."

  "I don't see how. You'll want to know about me."

  That struck her as somewhat presumptuous, yet disconcertingly true. She'd known him less than an hour, and she had no idea how he might react to the disclosures she had still to make, and so there was no point in liking him as much as she already did. At least now they'd crossed the North Circular Road, requiring her to direct him through the suburban streets. In two minutes they were in sight of Jericho Close, on the corner of which Mrs. Lancing, never a favourite neighbour of Leslie's, was in conversation with another woman. The Nova swung into Jericho Close and cruised to the end. "This is it," Leslie said.

  So it was, and she didn't feel ready. Was she going to take him through the house before she told him what he had to be told? Apparently so, because now she had climbed out of the Nova and was preceding him along the path. She reached for her keys and heard someone calling her name—rather more than calling. Mrs. Lancing's partner in conversation was approaching with a purposefulness that drove all expression out of her face, which looked tightened by the ponytail that rendered her head too small for the large frilly blouse blossoming from her terse skirt. In a moment Leslie recognised her from having exchanged not much more than guarded greetings with her once at the school: Shaun Nolan's mother.