Louder Than Words (30 page)

‘Minimal collateral damage too,’ said the woman, who I guessed must be Katrin. ‘Most of this place is derelict. No security guards at night. No one to get hurt.’

‘Where the hell is Silas?’ Josie whispered to me. ‘We need to get out of here and call the police or something.’

As we watched, a phone rang. Lara reached automatically into her pocket. She pulled her hand out, empty.

‘That’s my ringtone. Have you got my phone?’ she asked Dillon. ‘I can’t find it.’

Dillon made no move to get it. ‘Oh yeah, you dropped it earlier so I picked it up for you. Forgot to tell you.’

‘Give it to me then!’

‘No time for that now. We’re busy. Later.’

Lara put her hands on her hips. ‘Dillon, give me my phone!’

He picked up the bag and began to walk away.

‘Dillon!’

She chased after him and made a grab for his pocket. There was a scuffle and she went flying to the ground, but when she scrambled up, dashing away from Dillon, the phone was in her hand. She ran in our direction as Dillon came after her. He grabbed her arm, but she swung round and kicked out at him and he dropped to the floor, winded.

She didn’t even seem to notice as she talked into her phone. ‘What do you mean, where am I? I never told you to meet me anywhere. Where are you? . . . Oh shit, no, no . . . Listen you have to get out of there!’

Dillon reared up and tore the phone from her hand, smashing it to the ground.

‘What have you done, Dillon? What have you done?’

Jez and Katrin looked at each other blankly. Beside me, Josie grabbed my arm, squeezing painfully tight as she closed her eyes and swore under her breath.

Dillon’s face was an uncaring, guilty mask. ‘He knew too much. He’s betrayed our location to the police. Who knows what else he’s said?’

‘Are you insane? This is not what we are!’

Dillon reached over to Katrin and took the detonator from her unsuspecting hands. He flicked the switch.

‘NOOOOOOO!’ Lara screamed. ‘No, you can’t do this.’ He made a grab for her, but she evaded him. ‘I won’t let you do this!’ and she ran across the car park towards a warehouse on the other side.

Jez and Katrin called out, but it was Dillon who pursued her. Lara might be small, but she was fast – he couldn’t catch her. Josie and I hovered uncertainly by the building, still not fully comprehending what was happening, still stunned. The other two ran after them, yelling at Lara to come back.

Lara wrenched open the door of the warehouse – she was a speck in the distance beside the huge building but as she pulled the door back we saw flames lick out.

‘Fire!’ said Josie. ‘It’s on fire.’

‘SILAS! SILAS!’ Lara screamed and disappeared inside, still shouting. Dillon stopped dead, staring at the door. Jez sank to his knees, holding his head.

Josie looked at me, horror spreading across her face as we finally worked out amid all the confusion that Silas . . . Silas!

We ran out into the car park towards the warehouse. And then there was a loud bang.

‘Stop!’ Josie cried, yanking my arm to halt me. She got her phone out and dialled 999 frantically. ‘We can’t go in there! It won’t do any good! Hang on! I’m calling for help!’

I could hear her on the phone, her terrified voice begging them to come, but it was like an echo down a long tunnel, like she was a long way away. I fixed my eyes on the warehouse and prayed because there was nothing else I could do.

I died a thousand times from fear in the minutes before a figure came running out of the smoke and fell to its knees, coughing. It turned back to the door . . . And then there was an explosion so massive that it shook the ground we were standing on.

I heard the figure yell, ‘NOOOO!’

It was my brother’s blistered voice.

‘Silas!’

Josie and I ran towards him. She was still yelling into her phone.

The girl sank down on to the tarmac next to the man, howling. Dillon let out an inhuman cry of rage. Silas plunged back towards the flames.

Dillon cried out again as he went after him. ‘IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN YOU!’

And he brought the crowbar down on Silas’s head.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

RAFAELA AGAIN

I

As I finish writing Silas’s story, I can smell once again the hideous stench of burning. I can smell the blood on my clothes when I reached him and scooped his limp form into my arms. I can hear Josie’s sobbing voice on the phone calling for an ambulance. And Dillon’s feet slapping on the tarmac as he ran away.

It was Jez who pulled the crowbar off Dillon. Who pulled Dillon away from my brother’s battered body. He told the police everything. He felt responsible, he said. No one was ever,
ever
meant to die.

They tell me he was at Lara’s funeral. He begged to attend and they let him go.

Dillon wasn’t there. He took the car and he drove off into the night, no one knew where, a wanted man.

My brother didn’t go to Lara’s funeral either. As I finish his story, I sit beside him in the hospital, wires and tubes all over him. They managed to save his life . . . for now. But they can’t get him to wake up. So we visit and watch and pray – even though none of us really believe there’s anyone listening – Mum and Josie and I, so between us he’s never left alone. We do it in shifts. Mum says if he does wake she wants him to see a face he knows. I feel love for her when she says that.

I did what he asked me to with his computer. But before I wiped everything, I looked through his files. As he said, his password got me in. I found a set of draft emails to Dad. I copied them, but then I wiped the rest. The police might not want to pursue a boy in a coma, but I was taking no chances. His emails to Dad stayed hidden in my room on a memory pen I tucked inside my box of stories.

Day after day, we sit there by his bedside. Mum and Josie talk to him. I play him his favourite music. The nurses say we should keep trying to make contact – it’s important not to give up. He may be able to hear us even if he can’t respond.

How useless I feel when they say that.

So I began to write down his story. It might be the most important story I ever tell, and Josie reads it to him when she visits. I hope it will help him understand what happened. I hope he’ll understand we need him back and he’ll find a way home. His brain is healed now, they say. But he’s still hiding inside and someone needs to bring him back. The problem is no one seems to know how.

I wonder if Lara was alive, and he could hear her voice, if that would bring him back to us.

Toby comes to see him one day and brings some of the girls they used to hang around with together. Rachel cries when she sees Silas. They’re not allowed to stay long, but they are allowed in for a while because maybe one of them will be able to rouse him. Our brother and sisters come too. Mum calls them and they pay flying visits to see him. It took this to make us a family, Silas.

It works like this: Mum does the night shift, I skip school and do the day shift and Josie comes over in the evening. At night I stay at Josie’s house so Mum can be at the hospital. As Josie predicted, her dad went loco over her taking the car, but when he calmed down he could see it was something she would never do again. We were
in extremis
and had no choice. Still he was as mad as anything at her for putting herself in danger – far madder than he was that she could have caused him serious trouble at work. Except that no one cared about what she’d done, compared to Dillon. I think he was proud of her too though. They say if she hadn’t called the ambulance so quickly that Silas might not have made it this far.

And every waking moment I spend writing this book for Silas. I try to write him back to me.

It’s finished now and I don’t know what to do.

He lies there so still, unwaking, and I don’t know how to help him now.

It’s Monday afternoon and the hospital is quiet. For once no bells and buzzers echoing along the corridors. I sit beside my brother and watch him as he sleeps, a machine breathing for him through a tube. I watch the rise and fall of his chest. I see how his lashes are still ridiculously, enviably long. And he’s still as beautiful as when he was a child, though now his jaw has angles to it and stubble etchings. His hair has grown and is kicking up in curls. It’s grown while he is sleeping and they haven’t cut it yet, though they shave off his fledgling beard every few days.

He looks like a sleeping prince in a fairy tale, but there is no princess left to kiss him awake.

And his chest rises and falls, rises and falls, and he sleeps on and on . . .

I watch the hands of the clock move round, from one to two to three . . .

And then as the hand creeps round to four, I know . . . I know with utter certainty, no revelation was ever clearer than this . . . I know what will wake him.

It is as if every moment of failure of my life coalesces into this to make it all worthwhile, to claw us back from the precipice. I don’t have nerves. Me, who has been afraid of everything. The complete assurance that this is what my silence has been for saves me from that.

I
know
.

Andrea said the pressure of expectation stops me. There is no expectation here. No one to see me. No one to hear me except the one person who matters.

She would say, I think, that the pressure is too great. And she’d be right – I have never felt more pressure to do this than I do now.

But she’d be wrong as well. Because I need to do this so badly, I cannot fail. I will not fail.

I take my brother’s hand in mine. My voice is rusty with disuse and I don’t even recognise it as my own, but it works. I say, ‘Silas . . . Silas, it’s me, Rafi.’

For a long, long moment there is nothing, and then he opens his eyes.

II

We are in the cemetery. I sit on a bench while Silas stands in front of the gravestone. Josie stands beside him and he has hold of her hand for comfort.

Lara’s family gave her a beautiful headstone with a carved angel on it – I think it looks a little like her. I forgive her for what she did now, for she made sure my brother could come back to us and she lost herself to do that. I didn’t know she had that in her. Silas is less surprised. It was the Lara she wanted to be, he said, and he told us what happened inside the factory:

Lara ran through the warehouse, yelling Silas’s name until she heard him call back in return. He was heading towards her, coughing and choking from the smoke. Around him, piles of clothing were aflame.

‘This way! This way!’ She grabbed his arm. ‘I didn’t know, you have to believe me. It wasn’t me. We have to get out!’

Silas nodded, pushing her forward. ‘Go!’

She ran back towards the door, with him following. The fire was spreading fast. They had seconds and no more.

Then Lara caught her foot on something and sprawled headlong on the floor. Her chin cracked against the concrete. Silas hauled her up. She got her balance again, blinking as the smoke got thicker, and she lost sight of the exit. Silas lit up the way with the torch on his phone.

‘Go, go, I’m following you,’ she spluttered.

He held the light up so she could see and they stumbled on again.

They could see the door now, see the smoke pouring out of it into the fresh air. The flames were right behind them, all around them, ahead, licking so close. They leaped over them from space to space as they ran.

Silas hurdled one last heap of burning debris on the floor and he was out – he was safe. Lara had done it – she’d got him out.

He turned to see her make the jump herself. As she gathered herself, something with scorching flames fell from above . . . he saw her felled, pinned to the ground beneath burning debris. He lurched up from his knees to get her – he had to get to her – and then the place exploded.

I wonder if she did love him a little after all.

We spend a lot of time together, the three of us, now Silas is well again. I can even talk a bit sometimes. Josie has dragged me back to see Andrea and she’s delighted with how I’m doing. So is someone else: I managed to say ‘Mum’ last week. I spoke to my mother for the first time in ten years, and she cried and hugged me and said it was the sweetest sound she had ever heard. We still don’t understand each other, but Silas says sometimes you don’t need to understand to love. Josie says he might be right about that.

They’re talking as they stand looking at Lara’s grave.

‘When I look back at everything, some of the stuff she believed in, some of the stuff I came to believe in, it was right, you know,’ Silas says. ‘Just because they went about it wrong doesn’t make the heart of it any less right.’

‘So what do you want to do about that?’

He shrugs. ‘Rethink my plans. Maybe do some volunteering abroad like she talked about doing. Get my degree and try to use it to help people. Give back, not
consume
.’

Josie nods. ‘You should follow your heart. It’ll lead you the right way in the end.’

He reaches forward and brushes the headstone with a finger. ‘I feel like there’s nothing left of me to love anyone again the way I loved her. It’s in there, buried with her.’

‘Love isn’t a well that dries up,’ Josie answers. ‘You can never run out of it. But you can feel too bruised and lost to try again for a long time. I think that’s where you are now.’

Silas studies the ground at the foot of the grave. ‘I could lose someone important in the time it takes me to heal, couldn’t I?’

‘No. If someone is that important, they’ll wait.’

And I see him shift and stand a step closer to her, and see the barely perceptible squeeze of his fingers on hers.

Above us, an oak tree sheds some yellowing leaves to carpet the path and herald autumn. There’s a briskness to the breeze and a faint chill in the air that tells me the season of renewal is coming, where the land makes itself over again from fallen leaves and fruits and buried things, to lie fallow through the winter and be strong again for spring.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As ever, thanks to my agent, Ariella Feiner, for looking after me, especially this year in what has been a transformational twelve months. Thanks to my editor, Stella Paskins, for shaping the raw material into a real book, and for all at Egmont involved in getting the books out there, especially Jenny Hayes.