Louder Than Words (8 page)

She walked over to the island in the kitchen and began pulling glasses from a cupboard and throwing fruit and milk and ice cream into a blender. I watched, fascinated, from a high stool. This was not something I was familiar with. Silas might cook, but he didn’t make fripperies like this. She whizzed the whole lot together and then decanted it into two tall glasses, added another scoop of vanilla ice cream to the top of each and stuck a straw in.

‘Voilà!’ she said, sliding a glass towards me and taking a deep, satisfied suck on her straw.

It tasted great: summer in a glass.

She caught my eye. ‘Yeah, good, isn’t it?’

The door opened and closed behind me and I turned nervously to find a man in a suit coming in. He was tall and broad-shouldered with a serious face. His skin was a darker shade of brown than Josie’s and his hair was buzz-cut short.

‘Hello,’ he said to me and he had the deepest voice I’d ever heard. Rich too, a voice with many layers and tones, but most of all with a quiet and undeniable authority. This was not a man you argued with. I understood now why Toby said that day on the bus that Josie would never let her dad know what Lloyd had done. I’d tremble at having to confess anything to him.

And yet . . . he gave off this feeling that he’d keep you completely safe no matter what. Maybe she should have told him. He might have been mad at her, and his version of mad at you might be terribly difficult to take without crumbling to bits, but he’d have taken care of it. Of that I was sure.

Safe. Strong. That’s what I got from him in the instant we weighed each other up. I wondered what he got from me.

‘Dad, this is Rafi from down the street. You remember I told you she doesn’t talk.’

I raised my hand in a polite little wave.

He smiled, a small, reserved thing, but oddly comforting. ‘Yes. Hi, it’s nice that Josie’s made a friend here already. She’s talked about you a lot. She says you’re a very smart girl. And I can see that she’s right.’

I felt the surprise express itself on my face.

He tapped the side of his head with one finger. ‘Policeman’s prerogative, summing a person up in a few seconds. And we have to be good at it.’ He gave me a slow, serious wink and then walked towards the hall. ‘I’m off to shower work away and get changed. Josie, why don’t you cook something for your friend if she’s hungry. She’s welcome to stay for dinner.’

And in that moment how I wished he was my dad. Did Josie know how lucky she was? That calm, stable presence there at the end of every day for her. Expecting the best of her, but there to pick up the pieces when she failed.

‘You want to stay for dinner?’ Josie cocked her head at me hopefully.

Did dogs like bones? Yes, I wanted to stay. I wanted to drink in this atmosphere so I knew forever what normal was. Like an addict waiting for a hit, I wanted this sense of family vicariously over and over again.

Right then I was glad I had no words because I would not have wanted to have told my brother about this. It would have made me too sad.

I met a lady in the meads,

Full beautiful – a faery’s child,

Her hair was long, her foot was light,

And her eyes were wild.

(John Keats – ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’)

CHAPTER 11

Josie and I settled into a rhythm of hanging out with each other most evenings and weekends. Despite my expectation that once the Lloyd business was over she would take up with her other friends again, that simply hadn’t happened. It seemed that, like Mr Darcy, her good opinion once lost was lost forever. I ventured to say this to her, by text of course, and she laughed about it. Threw her head right back and laughed and laughed. ‘Yeah, my sister, you’re right about that.’

She called me that sometimes – my sister – and it made me happy.

My mother had an exhibition at a local gallery and insisted, in a rare moment of desire for familial solidarity, that we all went along one Saturday. Josie, never having had to suffer the exhibitions before, was fascinated and begged to come along. Silas didn’t inflict it on any of his friends so there were just the three of us. There were a couple of other artists debuting in the exhibition, but my mother was the main attraction.

Silas and I looked politely over our mother’s work, but really Josie was far more interested than we were. And then it would have been incredibly rude of us not to have given some time to the other artists so we trudged round their work too, listening to erudite types expounding on the merits of each piece. Or actually trying not to listen, but those people always have such loud voices that you can’t shut them out.

We stopped in front of a sculpture and I had the first glimmer of genuine interest I’d had in the whole two hours we’d been here. At first glance it looked like a heap of twisted metal and no more, but look closer and you could see tiny creatures hiding within – a field mouse, a butterfly, a wren . . . I walked round it, looking for more. I heard Josie exclaim and I knew she’d begun to see too.

But Silas . . . Silas never did see it. Because just as he began to focus on the sculpture to see what had so attracted our attention, a girl stepped into his line of sight.

I caught her scent before I saw her, a subtle, warm waft of fruit and spices. She stood, one hand on her hip, one foot turned out in front of the other like a dancer. Silky black hair fell straight past her shoulders, framing a heart-shaped face with porcelain skin which appeared to be free of make-up. She was dressed entirely in black: black jeans, black T-shirt, black canvas parka with a fishtail back that reached her knees and black Converse sneakers. She was small, maybe five foot two, and slim enough to be jealous of, but with enough curves to be even more jealous of. I felt Josie draw in a breath of envy beside me as she spotted the girl.

Josie was pretty, yes, but this girl was in another league. It wasn’t any one of her features individually that made her beautiful, but all put together she exuded
something
that even Josie and I could see.

Silas looked like he’d been sucker-punched.

‘You like this one?’ She spoke to me first, not to him.

Nod.

‘Then you like hidden depths,’ she said with a secretive smile. She turned to Silas. ‘How about you?’

‘Er . . . yeah . . . er . . .’ Silas’s cheeks had turned a faint pink.

Josie kissed her teeth and turned back to the sculpture.

The girl gave her a faintly amused glance and then proceeded to ignore her.

‘I noticed you walking around.’ I wasn’t sure which of us she was talking to. ‘Why do you come to an exhibition if you don’t like it?’

Silas finally appeared to find words again. ‘Oh, our mother’s exhibiting so, you know, we’ve seen all her stuff before.’

‘Clarissa Ramsey is your mother? Wow, that’s amazing.’ But she didn’t say it as if she found it amazing. More like she was secretly laughing at us because that’s how we expected her to react. She’d said what most people said when we told them who our mother was.

Josie wandered off to look at the next sculpture and I hesitated, caught between following her and worried about what would happen if I did. Silas was being highly weird with this girl.

‘It’s kind of more interesting for us to look at the other exhibitors,’ he said, apparently not minding if she was laughing at him.

‘Of course,’ she said, swapping her feet round in that strange half-third position she was standing in. ‘So what’s your favourite work today?’

He opened his mouth to answer her and then stopped, flummoxed.

‘Cat got your tongue?’ she said, starting to look away across the gallery as if he was boring her.

Silas laughed, a hard, surprised snort. ‘Looks like it,’ he said.

She looked back at him, mild interest reviving. ‘So do you have a favourite piece?’

‘Not really.’ He shrugged.

‘Honesty,’ she said thoughtfully, running her tongue over her teeth – small, white, even teeth. ‘Finally.’

He gave a rueful smile and stared at his feet. I could tell he was thinking he’d blown something. Suddenly, passionately and desperately, I hoped he had.

‘Lara,’ she said abruptly, holding her hand out to shake in an oddly adult gesture. How old was she? Around eighteen?

My brother took her hand in a firm but gentle grip. ‘Silas.’

She raised a perfectly arched eyebrow. ‘Unusual.’

‘Yes.’

At any other time, or with any other girl, it would be funny to see him so at sea, but I had a strong feeling he was swimming way too far out from shore. I called him back in my head, for all the good that would do.

She straightened up. ‘I should go. I have stuff to do.’

Silas’s face fell. Yup, he’d blown it. And then inspiration struck him. ‘Can I buy you a coffee? There’s a café opposite here.’

She regarded him with an impenetrable expression. ‘No, I don’t think so, thank you. Goodbye.’ And with that she walked off and didn’t look back.

Silas stared after her like a dog whose bone has been taken away.

Josie reappeared by my shoulder. ‘Hmmm . . .’ she said, ‘who on earth was she?’

I shrugged, perplexed.

‘Loves herself for sure,’ Josie said with a sniff.

But you would, wouldn’t you, if you looked like her? To have that much power, to stop a boy in his tracks that way, so that even now he was staring after the place where you’d been, it was inconceivable to me. My head could not imagine inhabiting a world where that was my reality. And of course it never would be.

I wondered how it made Lara feel. Did she even notice how far removed she was from girls like me, the ones who slip through life without ever turning a head in the street? Or were we not worthy of her attention?

When my brother finally turned away from the spot where she’d last been, his eyes held a misty look, as if he was still not back with us, still somewhere trailing in her wake.

CHAPTER 12

I couldn’t sleep so I pulled a hoody over my pyjamas and padded across the landing in bare feet to Silas’s room. I didn’t knock in case it woke my mother, but scratched quietly on his door instead.

‘Come in,’ was the whispered response.

I closed the door softly behind me and tapped a question on his shoulder.

He grinned briefly as he typed some mumbo-jumbo. ‘Fixing the stuff I did to get Josie’s loser to leave her alone.’ He gestured to his bed and I curled up on there, pulling a corner of the duvet over my legs. ‘But the crap I took down on that website stays taken down. Some of those comments! They were so far beyond out of order, they were in the stratosphere. I don’t get guys like that – they say they like girls, but they don’t or they wouldn’t talk about them that way. Don’t you ever go out with a boy who objectifies women that way!’

It was touching that he thought a boy would ever ask me to go out with him but there, that was classic Silas, forgetting how few people had the confidence not to follow and go with popular opinion.

‘You’re wrong – someone will,’ he said. ‘And it’ll be someone special. You’re lucky – the losers will leave you alone. You won’t have to waste time with them, or with people who don’t want you for who you really are.’ He crossed over and stroked my hair. ‘Don’t regret the lack of quantity, Rafi. Don’t ever do that because quantity means nothing. Quality is everything.’

Unaccountably I wanted to cry, in case he was right and there was hope. But no, Silas was a glass-half-full person and I just wasn’t.

He went back to his computer, opened another screen and typed more nonsense.

Were all boys like him really? In the darkness after midnight, would they spill the secrets of their soul into the right ear? And would those secrets be beautiful?

I thought of Toby and snorted. No, it couldn’t be that way with all boys. Not the ones who’d rather burp in your ear and fart on you than reveal a gossamer-thin thread of sensitivity, even if they actually possessed one. I was having a very hard time believing Toby and Lloyd had those threads at all.

I wanted to ask Silas because he might know. Maybe it was a boy secret after all and not to be revealed to girls. But even if I could have spoken, I didn’t think I could have articulated the question – it was too much of a tangle of confused ideas and feelings in my head.

As a fourteen-year-old girl, finding a way to ask one of the great mysteries of life, like whether boys who think girls are just sex objects have feelings too, is completely impossible. I would’ve had to sit down and draft that question several times before I got it to make anything approaching sense.

Silas glanced over at me and then opened up an internet browser. ‘I want to show you something, Rafi.’

I sat up and shuffled to the end of the bed. I didn’t recognise the website he was on. He opened up what looked like a very long series of conversations, some of them with links to pictures.

‘Read this.’

I scanned down the page and he scrolled as I read. After only a few posts, I wanted to turn away, uncomfortable at how these boys spoke to the girls.

‘Read it,’ said Silas.

I continued. They were trying to get the girls to post pictures, just like the kind Lloyd had taken of Josie. If they didn’t post them, they’d be shunned and nobody on the site would want to speak to them. Some girls had obviously just left and not come back. Others did post, and then there were comments after discussing how they looked, some complimentary, some anything but. One of the girls got upset and they all laughed at her.

‘Read enough now?’ Silas asked.

Nod.

‘Good. Remember that. And don’t ever, ever let a boy treat you like that. If they try, you tell them where to go. Like Rachel – she takes no disrespect from any boy. You don’t have to do stuff like that. No girl does. A boy who really likes you, he’ll do whatever you want. A boy who tries to get you to do this stuff, he’s got nothing you want. OK?’

Nod.

Silas nodded back, satisfied. ‘Anyway, what’s up? Can’t sleep?’

Nod.

‘You want to watch me kill stuff on here for a while?’

I thought about it. Probably wasn’t the thing most guaranteed to send me off to sleep but I’d never watched him gaming before and I was quite fascinated to see him in action. This was a side of Silas I didn’t know first-hand.