The Dark Page 23

  He means the way the windows look black with grime, though they aren’t. He points at the top of the kitchen window, at a gap big enough for him to put his skinny arm through. “Give us a step up.”

  “You mustn’t go inside.”

  “Give us one or I’ll say your dad kept feeling me and that’s why I ran off.”

  “Nobody’d believe you.”

  His face squashes itself thinner at me, and then he sees a lawnmower lying on its back in the long grass. He tips it up and drags it to the house and wedges the handle under the windowsill. There’s a bar under the handle, and he stands one foot on that. “If I fall through the glass I’ll say you pushed me,” he says.

  I’m almost sure nobody will believe him except maybe Jane, but being so close to Mrs Hammond’s house is making me nervous. He levers himself up and grabs the top of the sash and plants his other grubby foot on the windowsill. He wobbles as he shoves his arm through the gap, and I wonder whether he’ll say I felt him if I hold onto him. Then he twists the catch and the sash rattles down. He steps over and lands with a clang in the sink and pokes his head out of the window. “What are you going to do now, soft twat?”

  There’s nothing to be afraid of in there except what he might do. I know that’s what I’m most afraid of when he jumps down onto the kitchen floor. “Wait,” I plead. “I’ll come.”

  I’m not as used to getting into other people’s houses as him. I haul myself up to the sill from the bar of the mower and swing one leg through the window to try and stand in the sink. It’s further down than I like, and when I drag my other leg over the sash I nearly lose my balance. I feel as if I’m falling into somewhere deep and dark. I manage to grab hold of the taps, and when I’m steady I shut the window and fix the catch. Brad is staring at the windows painted black inside as high as Mrs Hammond could reach. “Mad old bitch then, was she?” he says.

  “Just didn’t like seeing herself in anything.”

  “Mad old bitch,” he says as though I agreed with him. He stares at the scratches she made all over the metal sink with a fork, and then I have to chase after him into the hall. He touches the switch for the jangly chandelier and leaves it alone in case people see he’s in the house. He scowls at the walls—at the patches that look painted with darkness. “Who got all her pictures?” he says as if it should have been him.

  “They weren’t pictures, they were mirrors. She took them down.”

  I remember them lying on their faces on one of her spare beds that was covered with broken glass. Brad’s throwing all the doors open. The rooms sound too big and empty, though they’ve still got furniture that looks fat and sagging out of shape with the dimness the black windows make. “Be a good fire,” Brad mutters to himself, but then he runs upstairs.

  The bathroom mirrors are smashed in the bath. “Said she was a dirty cow,” Brad sniggers, and I can’t tell him it was where she was most afraid to see herself. He probably wouldn’t listen anyway. He’s too busy heading for her room, where I used to hear her begging and praying when I had to let myself into the house with the keys she gave my parents. She wasn’t answering the doorbell any more, and she didn’t answer when I called up the stairs—maybe she didn’t hear me for talking, or maybe she couldn’t stop. “That’s some sponge that’s gone bad,” I heard once. “That’s a stick with some old rubber round it. That’s a claw, I don’t know what it belongs to. That’s a nasty mask someone’s wearing. It’s not me. It’s not me.”

  She hadn’t smashed the bedroom mirrors then. She’d wedged the wardrobe door open with some shoes to hide the glass on it, and she’d covered up the dressing-table mirror with a dress. Now they’re just bare wood that makes me think bits of a coffin have got into the room. “Feels squelchy,” Brad says, and I think he’s imitating Mrs Hammond somehow till I see he means the carpet under his bare feet. “Nothing worth a turd in here,” he complains and runs to push up the painted-over window.

  He kneels on the floor and squints through the slit at the backs of the houses across the garden. “Bet they’ve got stuff we ought to have,” he mumbles. As he’s getting up he points at the bed. “Is that her?”

  I feel as if the dimness is a crawling lump of soot that fills my head. I’m not just afraid to look, I can’t even see. Then Brad picks up what he was talking about—Mrs Hammond’s photograph album that was shoved under the pillow. A photograph of her being not much older than me falls out and he treads on it while he turns the pages, not caring if he tears them. “It’s just her old pictures,” I say to make him stop.

  I wish I hadn’t said it. Surely Mrs Hammond couldn’t hear me, but I feel guilty anyway, because it was the album she held onto when she was trying to hide from herself in the bed. “Which one do I look like?” she kept pleading the last time I let myself into the house. “Do I still look like this?” Now Brad picks up the photograph she was talking about and throws it in the album. “Got any matches?” he says.

  “I never have any.”

  “Sad soft twat then, aren’t you?” he says and runs downstairs.

  I’d leave the album if I didn’t think he might come back and use it to set fire to the house. I tuck it under my arm and go after him. When he sidles out of the front door I copy him and shut it so gently it feels as if it’s turned into rubber. Brad sneaks out of the gate but waits to mutter “If you say we went in there I’ll say you made me go in so you could have a feel of me.”

  I won’t be saying we went in. I’d take Mrs Hammond’s album to my room if I didn’t have to follow him while he spies on houses. More than once he wants me to keep watch while he prowls into someone’s garden or round the back of their house, but I won’t do that however many names he calls me. We go through the whole suburb that way in the dark till we come round again to my house.

  I let myself in and have to let Brad in as well. I’m glad he goes straight to the television, because it means he doesn’t see me putting the album under my bed. I’m hurrying to tell him to turn the television down when mother and Jane come in. “Jane wrote nearly a whole paragraph,” my mother tells anyone who’s listening, “didn’t you, Jane? You’ll be wearing a white collar at your factory at this rate, if you even stay. I know you’ll do everything you can for your workmates.”

  Jane doesn’t seem to like being talked about so much. “Have you been behaving?” she shouts at Brad over the television. “Get home now and turn that off. You can’t take it with you even if it’s bigger than ours.”

  “He hasn’t been much trouble, has he, Jeremy?” my father wants me to agree.

  “He didn’t stop you working.”

  “Luckier than me, then,” Jane tells my father.

  Brad switches off the television and sprints to pick his boots up. He’s sitting on the doorstep to pull them on when my father says “Excuse me, young man, but could that be our remote control that’s slipped into your pocket by mistake?”

  “Give it here,” Jane yells at Brad, and nearly hits him across the head with it except he ducks. She jabs it at my mother and says “I’m sorry that’s all you get for helping.”

  “You’ve given me and more importantly yourself a lot more than that.”

  As Jane drags Brad out of the gate my mother calls “Looking forward to next week.”

  My father makes a noise like humming a question and says “Bedtime for our youngest member unless he wants to finish his homework.”

  That’s all they say till I’m out of the bathroom and in bed, but the silence feels like my mother getting ready to tramp into the office and start. “So the best you can offer one of my students is calling her child a thief.”

  “Well, hold on, I don’t think we can honestly say I quite—”

  “Diet’s all that’s wrong with him, the kind the multinationals won’t be happy until everybody’s eating. That and wanting to be a man. Couldn’t you and Jeremy deal with him for even a couple of hours? His mother has to all the time.”

  “I wonder if we saw much evidence th
at she—”

  “There’s lots of evidence anybody but a man could see that she’s as brave as every one of my mature students. They need to be, not having the gender advantage. They work as hard as I do, but perhaps you don’t think that’s hard enough.”

  “Of course I do. I really wish you wouldn’t teach at night if it leaves you on edge like this.”

  “You’d rather we both left all the people we’ve failed to sink further, would you?”

  “I’m not sure you can say it’s us who’ve failed—”

  “Our whole class has,” my mother cries, and a lot more as well.

  When my parents come upstairs at last I still can’t sleep. My father says we always have to leave our bedroom windows open at night so the central heating doesn’t make us vulnerable to all the germs that are developing or being developed. The gap must be letting a wind in my room, because there’s a noise under the bed as if something’s got hold of Mrs Hammond’s album but can’t quite open it. I’m not going to look. I’m almost asleep when I hear the fumbling creep away, and then I am.

  In the morning my parents aren’t speaking much to each other, more at me instead. I’m almost glad to head for the school I have to go to because everyone else is as deserving of an education as I am and it wouldn’t be fair to the others to put all the best children together. I don’t think I’m one of them even if my dad does, just one of the few that go in uniform. Shaun’s been sniffing glue again and starts dancing on his desk, and Cindy keeps screaming at people because she says they’re staring at her, till they do to make her scream. Only those aren’t the main reasons I can’t do my work properly. Even when the teacher gets Shaun and Cindy taken off to the disruption room I can’t stop trying to think what to do with Mrs Hammond’s album.

  I don’t want to hear something moving in my room at night again. I never have before even when there was a wind. There’s nowhere to put the album except back where I found it—if my parents see it they’ll know I sneaked into Mrs Hammond’s house. Only we gave her keys to her son after she died even though he hadn’t been visiting her, so how can I get back in? I nearly think of asking Brad, though there are plenty of children at my school who’d be the same kind of help. I’ll have to climb up to her bedroom window he left open at the bottom if I can carry the album and a ladder across the road without being seen. Maybe I can climb without a ladder. I’m trying to remember the back of her house as I walk home with the homework half the class never bothers doing. By the time I reach my street I’m sure there’s a drainpipe close to her window. But there’s no drainpipe—there isn’t even a house.

  All that’s left is a huge lump of black smoke squirming every way as if it wants to dodge the water three fire engines are squirting at it. The house has fallen in with just some bricks of the ground floor and half a window left standing. It looks as if the house has been pulled out of shape by the smoke that’s black as tonight will be. I’m watching it and feeling Mrs Hammond’s nightmare is holding me there when my parents drive up in my mother’s car.

  When she climbs out her head goes up as if her open mouth is pulling it till her chin points at where the house was. “How on earth has that managed to happen?” she says as if whoever’s responsible is listening, and I do my best not to.

  “At least Mrs Hammond’s gone, thank heaven,” says my father.

  “The late owner,” my mother tells a fireman. “We did think she might cause a fire when there’s so little care for the elderly in their own homes, but do you know what actually happened here?”

  “The lady who reported it said some boys were seen going in there recently,” the fireman says, rubbing some black onto his forehead with the back of his hand.

  “That’s the least we can expect when child care for single parents is so inadequate.”

  He gives her quite a look and says “You’ll have to excuse me” as he strides off to his engine. Maybe he doesn’t realise that leaves my mother with an argument still to have, or maybe that’s what he’s avoiding. I watch the smoke trying to stand up as if it’s desperate to find the shape the house used to be. When my mother says “Come along, Jeremy, we don’t stare” I hurry after her.

  All the way through our Indian dinner that’s mostly rice so we remember how other people have to eat, I’m afraid someone will ask me if the boys were me and Brad. Instead she talks about her students so hard I can tell my father doesn’t dare to mention the children at his school. I wonder if she can’t let herself believe I got into Mrs Hammond’s house, but I think it’s more she won’t believe Brad did. As soon as all the dinner’s eaten my father says to me “I’ll see to the washing up and I should be about your homework.”

  I can’t open my window in case the smoke that’s left gets in. It feels as if its dark is trying to—I keep feeling its dark has crept behind me. Whenever I look round there’s nothing I haven’t always seen except Mrs Hammond’s album lying under the bed. I push it further under to make sure my parents won’t see it, but when I try and concentrate on my homework I can’t help seeing bits of the smoke heaving themselves about and turning into the night. As soon as I’ve finished my work, which isn’t much good, I go to the bathroom again and make myself switch off the light and get in bed.

  I seem to wake up more often than I sleep, but I suppose I do some of that as well, because I keep thinking something wants to catch hold of me in the dark. I try to stay close to the side of the bed near the window, but that means the dark is behind me. Before I came to bed I must have pushed Mrs Hammond’s album too hard, because in the morning I see a picture of her when she was a few years older than me has come out on the far side. It’s crumpled up as if someone tried to get hold of it, and most of its yellow has turned black—it looks as if the blackness is turning her into a shape I’d rather not see. I pinch the photograph between my nails and wriggle it into the album and drop the album in my schoolbag.

  I just want the only thing that’s left of Mrs Hammond’s to go somewhere it’ll be safe. I’d ask my parents to give it to her son if I wouldn’t have to tell them I was keeping it away from Brad—I’d ask where the son lives if they wouldn’t make me tell them why I want to know. I can’t eat much breakfast for being afraid they’ll see the album before I can leave, and my father has to eat what I don’t or my mother would tell us how many people could live on it for a week. I try not to look as if I’m carrying anything I shouldn’t in my bag when my mother puts her mouth on my forehead and my father shakes my hand before I can run out of the house.

  I wonder if I’ll have to keep the album away from people, but the girls and boys who might add it to the litter everybody drops at school are after anyone who doesn’t look English because the papers say the country’s letting too many asylum seekers in. At lunchtime I go upstairs to the library, where I often hide though there aren’t many books I want to read or many I don’t either. The librarian who’s always blinking and patting her foggy hair as if she’s making sure nothing has jumped into it off anyone is at the desk. “Hello, er,” she says when I start taking out the album. “Did you enjoy it?”

  “It’s an old lady’s photos I wondered if you’d want to have.”

  “Oh,” she says the way people sigh at babies, “er. Is she your grandma?”

  I haven’t seen either of my grandmothers for years, because my mother argues with them about everything, which she says means they’re victims of their class. “She was just a lady who lived near us,” I say.

  “And how did it come your way, er?”

  “She died. She didn’t want anything to happen to it,” I say and wonder if that’s true—I somehow think it is.

  “I don’t see it as material for us,” the librarian says without even looking inside it. “I expect you should give it to a parent or whoever you live with to look after, er.”

  “Jeremy,” I tell her, but she’s at her hair again as if I might have brought her more than a book.

  There’s a history lesson after lunch, and I try
to give the album to the teacher. “That’s not the kind of history we teach,” he says without looking in it, and lifts his top lip with his bottom one as if he’d like to plug his nose up, “even if any of you little charmers wanted to learn.” He oughtn’t to mean me, and it’s so unfair I don’t think about the album for the rest of the afternoon. I don’t start feeling nervous till I’m halfway home, but when I let myself in there’s another reason. My mother’s waiting with something to say and a blank face.

  The longer she doesn’t say it, the worse I think it’s going to be. I’m sure I’m being blamed but I don’t know for what. I hide in my room and try to work till my father comes home. At first she only sends him up to tell me dinner’s ready. She ladles out her carrot casserole before she dumps herself on her chair. “Well, I hope everyone’s satisfied,” she says to the ceiling.

  “It’s quite tasty and filling, thank you, dear.”

  If I were my father I wouldn’t have said that. I can tell she wasn’t talking about dinner. She makes us wait for her to say “My student Jane’s son has been arrested.”

  “No great surprise, perhaps. What’s the offence?”

  “Supposedly he was found in a house up the street, and the couple who live next door to it are claiming he robbed them. I don’t know how someone his size would be capable of taking everything they say he took.”

  “Perhaps it was inevitable. You shouldn’t blame yourself.”

  She lets her eyes and then her face down to him. “They’re saying they saw him near their house the night before last. Presumably nobody who hasn’t had their advantages is allowed near.”

  I see my father wants to think she’s stopped accusing us, but he doesn’t dare. “You were taking him to the park, weren’t you, Jeremy?” he says.

  “I said I would.”

  If she asks whether I did I’ll tell them everything. Maybe that will stop me feeling that it’s getting darker inside me than it is yet outside. But all my mother says is “I’m going to Jane’s to see what I can do for her. I’ve no idea when I’ll be back.”