Taken Away (18 page)

‘You're Lacy,' he whispered at last. ‘You're Lacy-Doll.'

Nan's eyebrows shot up, and she gave a delighted little laugh. ‘Oh, no one's called me Lacy-Doll since I was a girl! How lovely!'

‘What wrong with dat boy?' whispered Dee.

‘He's upset,' I answered. ‘And he's Dom, Dee. Call him Dom.'

‘I'm's cold.' She was shivering quite badly all of a sudden. I pulled my cardie open and wrapped it around her, cocooning her against my chest so that only her little head stuck out, and her little legs.

Dom rose shakily to his feet, looking down on our fragile old nan with a kind of blank sorrow. ‘You're Lacy-Doll,' he whispered. ‘You're Lacy. And that old lady. That old lady before. She really is May Conyngham, isn't she?' He looked up and around at the room, as if seeing it for the first time. I could practically hear things clarifying for him, little cubes of understanding falling,
clunk
,
clunk
,
clunk
, into place.

‘What is it?' I asked, though I had kind of guessed.

He looked at me, and maybe it was the librium, or maybe it was just that he had nothing left to feel, but I thought he was terribly calm when he said, ‘May and Lacy are three years younger than me. They're seven years old. That . . . that means I must be nearly eighty years old! How did that happen? How? A few days ago . . . maybe a week, at the most, I was ten. We were ten years old, Lorry! All of a sudden we're fifteen, and now . . . '

‘Time flies,' said Nan, nodding sagely. ‘It surely does.'

The temperature in the room began a steep downward slide. ‘Dom,' I warned.

‘Yes.' He held a hand out, flapping it at me without looking in my direction. ‘I know, I know. Calm down.' He breathed in deep. ‘Calm down,' he whispered.

Dad came in, peered at the telly and jumped. ‘Ah, lads! It's started! Why didn't you call? Sit down!'

He shooed Dee and myself into the armchair. I watched Dom do a slow spin in the middle of the room, his hand to his mouth, his big eyes blank. Dad grabbed him and pushed him down onto the fireside stool. ‘There we go!' he said and plopped himself down beside Nan.

‘Olive!' he shouted. ‘Doctor's on!'

Ma scurried in, drying her hands. She paused in the middle of the room. ‘Dave, it's freezing! Put some wood on the fire.'

Dad looked around her to see the telly and dragged her down into the corner of the sofa with him. ‘C'mere to me and I'll heat you up,' he murmured. Ma blushed and smacked his knee. He pulled her in under his arm and she rested her head on his shoulder, the two of them already involved in the show.

Dom sat by the fire, staring into middle distance. His mind must have been crawling, churning, boiling under his skull. I pulled Dee closer, like a teddy bear, like a blanket.

On the telly, Sarah Jane Smith screamed, and I didn't even turn my head from Dom. Dom. My real-life cliffhanger. My own personal tune-in-next-week. What were we going to do?

JAMES HUESTON

WE SAT THROUGH
the telly. We ate our dinner. Our father left us. All those things happened in neat little packages of time: one, then another, then another.

On his way out the door, Dad gave me a fierce hug. ‘Love you, bud,' he said, and I hung on to him for a fraction of a second after he tried to let go. He patted my back and clunked my forehead with his own. ‘Got to go, sonny boy.'

He turned to give Dom a hug and laughed in disbelief when Dom stuck his hand out instead. Dad shook hands with him, the corners of his mouth twitching. Then he pulled Dom into a hug anyway. Dom's arms remained at his sides. Dad released him and grabbed Dom's face between his hands, shaking it gently to and fro, looking into Dom's eyes.

Listen to me, bud,' he said. ‘You're never too big to hug your ‘old man.'

Later, in a phone call to Ma, Dad would mention the mysterious burns on the palms of his hands. He thought maybe one of the bleach barrels at work had sprung a leak; it was the only explanation he could come up with. No, he couldn't remember exactly when he got them, but they hurt like blazes.

I helped carry his bag to the car, Dom trailing behind. It was beautiful outside, the air tinted a clear pink, scented with the outgoing tide. The sandy garden was cold under the bruised shadow of the house, but the car was still in sunshine. It threw the mellow gold of the late-evening sun back at us from a dozen gleaming points and radiated a day's worth of heat up from its metal body. I leant against it, soaking it up.

Dom stayed in the shadows, his face glimmering in the oncoming dusk. We watched as Dad put his things in the boot of the car.

‘I'll be back Friday, bud, okay?'

I nodded.

He waved at Dom. ‘See you, son.' Dom lifted his chin in goodbye. Dad's hand lingered in the air, hurt finally showing through his amusement. ‘Well, okay then,' he said.

He tousled my hair and got into the car. I stood back as the engine coughed to life. He pulled out into the lane, his indicator tick-tocking. Then he was gone, and I was alone.

It felt like a hundred years since Dom and I had pimp-walked down the strand, singing and swatting at each other with sticks. A million years. A lifetime. But it had been yesterday. Yesterday morning, I'd had a brother. I'd had a best friend. He'd been fun. He'd been interesting: my slow-burn, articulate counterweight. Now I was lopsided, a boat with one paddle, rowing frantically and spinning in a slow, maddening circle around the space that should have been him.

‘This was a beautiful garden once.'

I turned, glaring at him over the warm stones of the low wall. I couldn't care less about his bloody garden. He gave me his speculative look and stepped uncertainly from the shadows. The light obviously bothered him, because he immediately shaded his eyes. He tried to stand, as I had done, facing into the evening sun. But instead of comfort it seemed to cause him only pain, and he gasped and stepped back into the shade, his hand clamped over his eyes.

‘Are you alright?' I asked, grudgingly.

He nodded, his hand still over his face, his teeth gritted. Eventually the pain seemed to subside and he opened his eyes, cupping his cheek in his hand and looking blankly into middle distance.

‘We've lost our brothers, haven't we?' he murmured.

My heart constricted as I realised we'd been thinking the exact same thing. ‘No,' I said. ‘We'll get them back.'

He raised his eyes to mine, and the smile he gave me was so sad and so kind that I almost liked him. That was such a betrayal of Dom that I scowled. ‘What made you think I was Lorry?' I asked.

He shook his head, looking me up and down, as if trying to figure it out himself. ‘We're twins, too. Lorry and I. Maybe that's why?'

He gestured down at himself, then at me, as if to remind me that Dom and I were twins. As if I could somehow have forgotten. He looked straight at me with Dom's clear brown eyes. ‘I feel so lost without him,' he said.

Twins? Lorry and Francis were twins!

I was trying to process this wacked-out information while he kept talking, quietly working things out in his head. ‘In the grey, it all made sense. I was alone, searching for so long. And then – then there was suddenly a
feeling
, a feeling of loneliness and pain and confusion – it was like a
sound
in the grey. I was able to follow it, and when I did, I found this
boy
. He
knew
me. He talked to me. I thought I'd found Lorry. Do you understand? Do you know how that felt? I'd
found Lorry
– at last.' His face brightened for a moment, remembering this joy. Then his hands fell to his sides, the happiness gone. ‘Then the man came. And he was so angry. He's always angry, but now he was
furious
. He shouted at us. In the garden.'

‘I
told
you, that was
me
.'

‘No . . . well, yes . . .I don't know. I think you were there . . . but
he
was there, too. And he was angry. He frightened Lorry.'

‘Dom,' I corrected automatically, ‘he frightened Dom.' But my thoughts were miles away. I was remembering the phantom soldier and wondering – was he still here? Did he still want Francis? If so, would he hurt Dom to get to him? I looked over Dom's shoulder, past the apples trees, into the deep shade of the undergrowth. Despite the heat of the sun, the hair on my arms prickled up. I laid my hands on the warm stones of the wall just to feel something real.

‘Dom?' I said, my eyes on the shadows behind him. ‘Why don't you come over here, come and stand by me?'

But he was still trying to explain that night, his eyes distant. The shadow of the house was like a purple stain at his feet, and he seemed to float against it, a thing detached. ‘I woke up,' he whispered, ‘perfect and whole again. Part of the world again. But nothing was simple anymore.' He looked back at the house. ‘Nothing made sense.'

He seemed to tune me out for a while, as he examined the house. His eyes roamed the sky-reflective windows, the rust-coloured bricks, the ivy-covered apple trees. I did the same, and tried to imagine the changes seven decades would wreak upon a home.

‘Do you know who May Conyngham is?' he murmured.

I shook my head, my throat dry.

‘She's my little sister.' He looked back at me suddenly. ‘Imagine that. Imagine waking up tomorrow, and that wee girl you're so fond of is suddenly an old woman, and the frilly wee sprat that was her best friend is assumed to be your grandmother.'

I couldn't. I couldn't imagine Dee aged ten, let alone in her late seventies. It was beyond me.

‘I have my own grandmother, you know.' He gave a wry smile. ‘She's a rotten-tempered old harridan, actually, gives my eldest sister Jenny an appalling time. In the grey, I'd forgotten all this – my sisters, my mother.' His smile died as quickly as it had flickered into life. ‘Oh! My poor mother! How must she feel? She dotes on us.' He raised his eyes to me, horrified. ‘How can I have forgotten all this? It was so simple in the grey. Everything else faded out, and there was just me, and I was looking for Lorry, then that damned man was chasing me, and that's all there was! That's
all
!'

‘Did he murder you?' I asked. ‘That man – the soldier? Did he kill you and Lorry? Is that why he haunts you?'

Dom shook his head, his expression helpless. ‘I don't remember,' he whispered. The house at his back was eating up the light. His face had become a shimmering blob, his eyes dark, tragic smudges under the hanging fringe of his hair. He looked as though he were being eaten by shadows; as if the evening were sucking the last of his energy from him. I was suddenly overwhelmed with the sense that we really should
do
something. Just do
something
. Anything. I just wanted to be free of this endless claustrophobic mess.

‘Let's go for a walk,' I said.

His eyes snapped up in surprise, and I could see my own desire reflected in his face.

‘Let's walk to the headland,' I said, leaning towards him over the wall.

Yes. The sea – the pounding immensity of it; the wild air of the strand. We'd walk the legs off ourselves, run the entire length of the strand and climb the weed-encrusted boulders at the far end of the beach. We'd keep going 'til we were as far from here as possible. We'd drop unseen into a hidden cove and yell ourselves hoarse against the roar of the surf. Just for the sheer release of it. Just because we could.

‘Come on!' I said. ‘We can walk the strand. Go to Red Island.'

He wanted to. He wanted to so badly. But he remained on the shadowy side of the garden, his hands opening and closing, his face desperate. He hadn't the strength or the courage to cross back into the sun.

I couldn't stand the thought that we wouldn't go – that we'd just go back into that house. That we'd just sit there. ‘We can climb the rocks!' I cried. ‘We can skip stones!' Dom loved to skip stones, but he wasn't good at it, not like me. The thought of Dom pushed me into anger. ‘Come
on
!' I yelled. ‘Come on!' I slammed my fists down on the wall, hurting them against the stones. ‘Let's go! Let's get moving!'

He began an apologetic gesture but then froze, startled. His eyes slid left of me, and I knew immediately that someone was behind me.

I spun to find a very old man standing there. It wasn't hard to recognise him – though he looked quite different to our first encounter. His extremely pale eyes would always give him away.

It was the auld fella we'd pulled from the sea.

He wasn't drunk this time, though he was faintly scented with whiskey. His bright cloud of hair was Brylcreemed down behind his ears and parted neatly on the left. Carefully washed, his face and hands were pink, his cheeks clean-shaven. He had a farmer's flat cap clenched in his two hands, and he was regarding Dom with a stunned expression on his face.

‘How long have you been standing there?' I said.

The old man didn't take his eyes from Dom. ‘What the divil?' he said and made to move around me, heading in through the garden gate, his eyes never leaving my brother.

‘Hey!' I put my hand up – had to actually place it on his chest before he finally noticed that I was trying to stop him getting in. I pushed him gently but firmly back a step. ‘Where d'you think you're going?'

He finally seemed to register my presence, and the expression in his pale-blue eyes had my heart skipping a beat. ‘Do you know what's wrong with your brother?' he said.

Dom and I traded a surprised look. ‘What do
you
think is wrong with him?' I whispered.

The old man seemed to check himself at that, and he cleared his throat, frowning. His eyes slid to the right. I think he'd spoken without thinking and was regretting his question. ‘Well . . . ' He stood a little straighter, retreating behind himself. ‘Well,' he repeated. ‘He looks a bit pale, doesn't he?'