Hello Darkness (6 page)

“Go on.”

“And that unless I find out who did the deed, the play –
your
play – gets cancelled.”

I felt the room’s hostility level rise like the water when a fat man gets into the bath.

“Get one thing straight, pretty boy,” said Emma. “
Nothing’s
going to stop this show.”

“Then maybe you should help me find out what’s really going on here.”

“And how do you propose I do that?”

“I’m just a guy on his own. You’ve got the resources; you’ve got the reach. There’s not much that goes on in this school that the Queens don’t know or couldn’t find out about. If we work together, we can crack this.”

“But the entire world seems to think that you’re the one behind it. In fact, there is a very easy way to sort this out right now. You run along to Mr Shankley, and you tell him that you killed those itty-bitty bugs for whatever crazy motive you had. Then you take your punishment and the play goes on. Simple.”

“Not so simple. I didn’t do it.”

Dorothy sighed. “I’m bored with this. I’ve got Munchkins to train. We tried playing nice, Middleton. We tried giving you a chance.”

And suddenly I found, as she was speaking, that there were hands gripping me. No single hand was strong, but together they were overpowering. I was set down on the floor and held like a pirate about to have his leg sawn off.

“Sophie!”

I heard the door open and felt a heavy tread. Whatever it was that just came in was standing out of sight behind me. Suddenly I was freaked – and it takes quite a lot to freak me. Somehow I knew that behind me there lurked something truly terrible, something from the depths of the earth – or perhaps just from the darkest place of my subconscious.

“Yes, Dorothy?” The voice squeaked like Minnie Mouse, but this was one of those occasions when you know the voice doesn’t go with the mouth.

“Playtime.”

Giggles. Girlish giggles.

Sweat burst out on my forehead, and I strained to see whatever it was that moved behind me.

But I couldn’t see. I would never see.

“Look,” I said, panic giving my voice a metallic edge. “The Shank has given me four days. That’s all I need. I’ll find the real killer, and then everyone gets to go to the Emerald City.”

“If I let Sophie loose on you, you’ll say whatever I tell you to say, do whatever I tell you to do.”

“Then that makes you worse than the Shank. Even he was prepared to give me some time to get to the bottom of this.”

Dorothy came so close I thought she was going to kiss me. But I saw something in her eyes. She was ruthless and she was powerful, but she wasn’t the Shank.

“So, what if I trust you and you let me down, huh?”

“I won’t let you down.”

“That’s what you boys always say.”

“If I don’t find the real killer in four days, then I’ll take the fall. I’ll be your patsy.”

Again Emma West stared at me with those ageless, beautiful, fatal eyes. I could have been waiting for three seconds or three hours.

“OK, you’ve got your chance.”

I heard a stunted wail of disappointment from behind, and heavy steps moved away. The hands holding me released their grip, and I picked myself up from the floor.

“I think Sophie liked you,” said Emma, conjuring up the image of a whale liking krill. “And if you don’t find out who did this, then I guarantee you’ll be getting better acquainted.”

I shrugged. “If I get out of this maybe you and I can give Sophie the opportunity to feel a little jealous.”

Emma laughed. It was the first sound I’d heard coming out of her mouth that seemed spontaneous. Suddenly she looked like what she was: a drama-crazed schoolgirl who just wanted to put on a show.

“Maybe, kid, maybe,” she said. She flickered close to me, like a flame, and kissed my cheek. “Don’t make me sorry. You won’t like it.”

And then she spun away on her kitten heels, and I headed for the corridor.

On the way, I felt a hand on my sleeve. It was Hart.

“You want to know where to look?” he asked, in that careless way of his, as though nothing mattered.

I wasn’t in the mood for him, or for cryptic questions.

“Get screwed, Hart,” I said. “I don’t care by who or what so long as I don’t have to watch.”

He sighed a little. “Some people you just can’t help.”

I wanted to inflict a little pain on Hart, but the truth was I had nothing. “Say what you’ve got to say.”

“The Lardies.”

Then he was gone. And so was I.

THERE
was only half an hour of the school day left, so I slipped through the gates and began walking home. It was a mile. A long mile. I’d been slapped, punched, kicked and coshed. I was sad and sore and confused.

And hungry: I’d had nothing to eat all day.

The streets around the school were pretty scuzzy. In places, low-rise concrete blocks had replaced the old redbrick houses, but they in turn were now being demolished, leaving scruffy open spaces where people had once lived out their lives. Nothing lived there now, unless you counted the odd hunched rat. In one of these dead zones a gang of skeletal children stood around a burning mattress. You could see the stains on the mattress, like archaeological layers: the incontinence of childhood; the marks of love or lust; the returning incontinence of dotage. And now the smoke and stench of the pyre.

One of the kids stooped to pick up a piece of broken brick. He hurled it at me, but it fell short, and he returned his gaze to the smoking mattress. I walked further, then turned back, but all I could see was the smoke and haze, and I wondered if I had imagined the skeletons and the brick.

A little further on I heard a racket. Furious barking, hissing, yowls. I looked around. The council had planted a few feeble saplings here and there to create the illusion that they cared about the environment. Most had been ripped up or kicked down or just plain poisoned by the rotten air. But a few remained. And now a skinny black cat was perched a couple of metres up one of them, and a dog was leaping at it, its jaws snapping just below the leafless branch.

The dog was some kind of cyborg killing-machine. Not pure pit bull, but pit bull mixed with the meanest genes from the meanest dogs. The cat was as high up as it could go in the flimsy tree and the dog was going insane. It frothed at the mouth and its eyes were filled with hate and death lust.

I thought about walking on. Did, in fact, for a couple of steps. But then I turned. The cat was going to be dog food, and I didn’t want that on my conscience. The trouble was that I couldn’t see how I could help without getting myself chewed up too.

I walked towards the dog. It was still in psycho mode and had started to bite its way through the slender trunk of the sapling. Either it had worked out that if it could chomp through the wood, it would get the cat, or it was just in the mood to bite anything that got in range.

“Easy, boy,” I said, in a soothing voice.

The dog stopped chewing the tree, looked at me for a second, then got back to work. You could almost see the thought going through its head:
Cat first, then him
.

I walked closer. It really was a beast of a dog. There was definitely some Rottweiler in there. Japanese Tosza probably too. Heavy muscles rippled around its neck like waves in lava. Every nerve in my body was screaming at me to run. But sometimes you have to slap yourself in the face, grit your teeth and go on.

There was a splintered piece of wood on the floor. I picked it up and waved it in front of the dog. It stopped chewing the tree again; its black eyes followed the movement, back and forth, back and forth.

“OK, boy, fetch,” I yelled, and gave the stick a mighty hurl. I couldn’t believe my luck when the dog bounded after it. I quickly went up to the tree, expecting to have all kinds of trouble coaxing the cat down. But as soon as I put my hands up to it, the little creature leapt into my arms. It wormed its way into my jacket, and trembled, light as an autumn leaf. It was so insubstantial it hardly seemed to exist at all.

The dog was still busy killing the stick, but it wouldn’t be long until he remembered that cat tastes better than wood, so I legged it in the opposite direction down the street, going at a lick to give Usain Bolt a scare. I imagined the beast tearing after me, jumping onto my back, its solid bulk forcing me down, the huge teeth sinking into the nape of my neck. But for a change, the worlds of imagination and reality stayed separate, and I reached my front door unsavaged.

I put the cat down on the doorstep. I thought it would slink away, but it coiled itself around my legs, purring like it was running off an electric motor.

“Sorry, Cat, you can’t come in. My mum’s allergic.”

But the purr began to sound so much like “please” that I gave in.

“OK, I’ll feed you, but then you’re gone. There’s probably some kid out there who’s missing you already.”

I opened the door on a house as empty as a skull. I’d forgotten that they’d all gone to the funeral. My eye went to the cork noticeboard:

Johnny, remember to take your medication
.

That irritated me. Why couldn’t they just trust me? I scrunched the note and slam-dunked it into the bin.

“OK, Cat,” I said, “let’s get you something to eat.”

I found a can of sardines.

“Who the hell eats sardines?” I wondered aloud.

“Meeeeee,”
mewed the cat.

“Come on then; let’s do this on the roof. You’ll like it.”

I had the attic room, which suited me fine. There was a dormer window sticking out from the slope of the roof. It wasn’t a tough job to climb out and sit up there, on the flat of the dormer. I took the cat and the sardines out with me. She sniffed at the edge of the roof nervously, but then relaxed. I opened the can and before I put it down, she was greedily lapping at the oil.

“Hungry, eh?”

She was too busy eating to answer.

The roof was my favourite place to be in all the world. Nothing could reach me here. It was pure and free.

Except that thoughts of the day crept in, feeler-first, like cockroaches.

There was something I was missing. Something not quite right. Aside, I mean, from the massacre of the stick insects and the various beatings I’d taken.

I tried to get the universe to come into focus. But it was like when you stare at a light bulb and then look away, and the yellow image of the bulb is superimposed on whatever you’re looking at. Except this was as though I’d been staring at a light bulb in the shape of the world, and the light-bulb world was now lying over the real world, but was shifted out of sync by a degree or two.

I got lost in that thought for a while, the thought of the different worlds, one made out of light and one made of earth, and then when that got me nowhere, I scrolled through the memory tapes a few more times, pausing at the key events.

Funt and Bosola.

The Shank.

Vole.

Chinatown.

Mrs Maurice.

The Queens.

I tried fitting them together this way and that, but all I got was the jabber of modern jazz played by a deaf Bulgarian.

Hungry. I’d forgotten that I was hungry. And I had to take my pills. The cat had licked the tin clean. I tried to pick her up to bring her back in, but she slid through my hands. Then she jumped down nimbly onto the balcony on the floor below, from there leapt to the garage roof, and then was lost in the twilight.

“Bye, then,” I said, and heard an answering purr from the shadows down below.

In the kitchen I opened a tin of peaches. Some people thought it was weird that all I ever seemed to eat was tinned peaches. But I have a dark secret: I like tinned peaches.

I crashed down on the sofa and tried to shut out the events of the day. I tried to pretend that it was all make-believe, a fantasy. It worked, and I was half-asleep when the phone rang.

“Hi, Johnny.”

I was still groggy. For a second I thought it might be Ling Mei. I saw her face, but then it dissolved into Emma West. But that wasn’t right either. It was…

“Hello, Mrs Maurice.”

“Hey, Johnny. I’ve been thinking about you. And your little friends.”

“How did you get this number?”

“I’m your teacher, Johnny. There are all kinds of things I know about you.”

I didn’t want to get caught up in one of
those
conversations with Mrs Maurice, so I cut to the chase.

“Did you find out what happened to the sticks?”

There was a pause. I could hear her breathing into the receiver. Then she answered, and her voice was cool and professional.

“I believe I did, yes. You see, there was something about this incident that puzzled me. The stick insects had been killed and then thrown onto the floor in the lavatory block. That all suggested some random act of violence. But I couldn’t find a mark on the bodies. If this was some little brat’s idea of a jape, some spur-of-the-moment thing, then you’d have expected him – or her – to squash the stick insects. But they’d been killed without violence.”

“Killed by a pacifist. Nice irony.”

“Quite. Though perhaps I should have said without
undue
violence. And that requires a certain amount of expertise. There are various ways of killing bugs without damaging them. You can suffocate them. You can freeze them. Or you can poison them.”

“And how did these guys meet their end?”

“I’ve already told you, these weren’t guys. You see the phasmids – that’s the stick insects and their relations – usually reproduce by parthenogenesis. That is to say the females do not need to …
mate
in order to produce fertile eggs.”

“
Jeez
, another reason not to be a stick insect.”

You know how sometimes you can
hear
a smile? I heard one now.

“So,” she continued, “we’ve finally found something we agree on.”

There was a danger of veering off-piste. I took us back onto a blue run.

“Mrs Maurice, what killed the stick insects?”

“Ethyl acetate. Harmless to humans, but deadly to invertebrates.”