The Dark Inside (6 page)

‘See much action?’ asked Webster.

As the man picked out the right change from the till, he rapped his right thigh with a knuckle and there was a hollow, hard sound as though he was knocking on a door.

‘You?’ he asked.

‘Yeah,’ replied Webster. ‘You could say that.’

‘And now here we are,’ he said, handing Webster his change. ‘Here we bloody are. At least you got your boy.’ He smiled at James.

‘Yes,’ said Webster. ‘I’m glad to have him.’

‘You gonna be a para too, son? Like your dad?’ James shrugged. ‘No? Well, I don’t blame you. Stripping down your SA80 ain’t much use out here in the real
world.’ The man cocked a finger at Webster and pulled the trigger. ‘
Ready for Anything.
Anything but Civvy Street, right?’

‘Ready for anything but life,’ replied Webster and the man cackled a laugh that flopped strands of black hair down over his forehead.

As they drove away, James looked back at the garage. The man was hobbling across the forecourt, pulling up a wire chain until it was hanging between four metal posts. Eventually, he disappeared
from view as the road bent round.

‘Ready for anything,’ said James. ‘Is that what the Latin said?’ Webster nodded. ‘Is that what they teach you in the army?’ Webster nodded again.
‘Isn’t it impossible? To be prepared for everything, I mean.’

‘Yes,’ said Webster. ‘But you have to try.’

The church was on the outskirts of the town, hidden from the main road by a screen of chestnut trees. Webster parked the car in a side street lined with redbrick houses set
back from the pavement, each one an echo of the one beside it. When James opened his door, he smelt newly-cut grass. Diesel. Dirt in the drains.

The afternoon was starting to lengthen and they walked through shadows that crept from walls and corners like outriders of the night. Kids buzzed around the street, screaming and shouting.

When Webster noticed a little girl clip-clopping towards them in red high heels and wearing a set of black beads, he stepped off the pavement and waved her by with a low bow. She was pushing a
buggy, its four orange wheels crackling like pepper grinders. A naked plastic baby was strapped in the seat, sitting with its arms outstretched.

After walking past them, the girl wheeled the buggy around and started back down the path, shushing and cooing as she went.

‘She won’t settle,’ she said, going past again.

‘She will,’ said Webster and grinned at James.

But she shook her head. Pointed at the other kids playing. ‘Not with all that noise,’ she sighed.

Webster watched her tottering in the heels until he heard something that made him start. When James looked up, he realized the kids playing in the street were shooting each other with imaginary
guns. Lobbing imaginary grenades. Dying horribly and eagerly in their made-up world. Webster took a deep breath and started walking, plunging shaking hands into his pockets.

James trailed behind. When they stopped to cross the road, he stepped up beside Webster. ‘Did you ever fight in a war?’ he asked.

‘Yeah.’

‘Which one?’

‘Iraq.’

James cleared his throat as the man checked for traffic. He lined up his toes on the edge of the kerb and waited until his shoes were perfectly matched.

‘Did you ever kill anybody?’

Webster said nothing. A car passed. They stood there for a moment longer and then they crossed the road in silence.

James kept behind Webster the rest of the way, cursing himself.

The church was locked. The large oak door was arched and silvered and ancient, and quartered into four sections by two thin pieces of brown metal, one laid across the other in
the shape of a cross.

They walked around the building and tried another smaller door. But that was locked too.

‘We’ll get in tomorrow,’ said Webster as they came back round to the main oak door. James gave him a look. ‘Sunday. They must be open on a Sunday, unless the rules have
changed.’ And he tapped at the service sheet pinned to the cork board in the porch.

James just nodded.

Sunday?

The past couple of days seemed to have passed outside of ordinary time. As though he had dreamt them. He was supposed to have double maths on Monday morning. There was going to be an algebra
test.

‘You all right?’ Webster was staring at him.

‘Yeah,’ said James. ‘I’m good.’

‘Well, all right then.’ And both of them smiled.

The plastic tables in the café were white. The floor was like a giant-sized chessboard and James tried plotting moves in his mind, with imaginary pieces as big as him,
while chewing his burger and dipping his fries in ketchup. But, after one night sleeping in the car, he found it hard to concentrate, as though somewhere inside a valve was gradually tightening.
When he started watching other people, laughing and talking, he suddenly became aware of his skin feeling dirty and how much his school shirt and trousers smelt of the travellers’ car. As he
blinked, gravel seemed to churn at the backs of his eyes.

‘Where are we going to sleep tonight?’ he asked.

Webster took a slurp of tea.

‘We’ll get a room. With proper beds. We can’t spend another night in the car. I’ve got enough money.’

James sucked on his Coke. ‘Where’s it all from?’ he asked, trying not to sound too interested.

‘The old boy who helped me. He gave it to me. After he let me out of the cage.’

‘Why did he do that?’

‘Because he wanted to help.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.’

James wasn’t sure what to think about that. And he tried not to think too hard about what might happen when the money ran out.

‘Thanks for the burger,’ he said and rubbed at his tired eyes with a knuckle.

‘You saved my life. Remember? That’s a whole lot of burgers in my book.’ And Webster grinned.

‘You saved me first,’ said James, wiping his mouth clean with a paper napkin and crushing it into a ball. ‘Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to work.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘One good thing leads to another.’

Webster clicked his fingers. Smiled.

‘You’ve cracked it,’ he said. ‘The answer to life.’ And, with his mug of tea, he toasted James who beamed because Webster seemed genuinely happy, as if a weight had
been lifted from somewhere deep inside. For a moment, the future didn’t seem to matter at all.

They sat in silence for some time, watching the street through the freckled, grimy windows, full and content with the world. And then James noticed that Webster was looking carefully at anyone
who walked past. Following them down the street.

‘You think they’ll find us, don’t you?’

Webster nodded.

‘I don’t see how.’

‘They will.’

‘We’ll find the key first,’ said James.

‘I hope so.’ But he kept staring at the world outside.

The two of them walked side by side along the pavement like father and son. They stopped outside the window of a charity shop when Webster pointed at a mannequin dressed in a
black two-piece suit.

‘You’d look good in that,’ he said. ‘Sharp.’

James swallowed down something stuck in the back of his throat. It might have been a hair. Or grease from the fries.

‘I’ve only worn a suit once,’ he managed to say before clearing his throat again. And Webster’s smile wavered slightly as he nodded.

James looked the mannequin up and down. When he half closed his eyes, the figure looked like a normal person that could have been him.

They heard a bolt slide across the door. An old woman was locking up the shop.

‘Well?’ asked Webster. ‘Do you want to try it on?’

James looked up into Webster’s smiling face and something melted inside him, so he nodded, and Webster ran to the door and banged on it and flapped his wad of notes against the glass.

‘The suit!’ he shouted. ‘We need that suit!’

And both of them laughed as the old woman’s flustered face broke into a smile.

James tried it on with a clean white shirt and a tie.

‘Looks good,’ said Webster.

‘Looks sharp,’ said James and he struck a pose that made Webster roar.

They chose an armful of jeans and shirts and tops which they stuffed into a duffel bag with worn leather handles that cost less than a pound.

When the old woman let them out of the shop, James told a joke that made her laugh. And he saw in her eyes that she was glad for both of them in some way and it lit a light in his chest, which
glowed for some time afterwards.

The motel room was a twin. It was cheap and beige. The single dirty window had plastic venetian blinds that worked by pulling on a beaded metal chain like the one in the bath
for the plug.

Webster lay on his bed and James on his. The black suit was draped over the back of a chair together with the shirt and tie.

The boy reread the pages he had printed off the Internet, underlining sections here and there that interested him.

‘Did he say anything else about St Hubert? Or the key?’ he asked Webster.

‘Who?’

‘The old traveller who helped you escape. The one who gave you the money.’

‘No.’

James drummed his fingers on the pages.

‘What was he like?’

‘Nice enough,’ said Webster, staring at the ceiling, his arms in triangles behind his head. ‘Sad though. He had a big scar on his face. Like someone had opened him up and
pulled out the happiness and stitched him up again.’

‘Why do you think he was so sad?’

‘His three children hadn’t stayed. And he lost his wife a couple of years ago. He loved her very much.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because of the way he talked about her. She had golden blonde hair and blue eyes and lips as red as holly berries. She ran away to be with him when she was only sixteen. He gave her a
bouquet of daisies on their wedding day because it was all they could afford.’

James stared at Webster, remembering how the woman in the charity shop had smiled at them and how it had made him glow. Suddenly, he wanted to know if Webster had a family too. Anyone. But
somehow he didn’t want to ask. Not now. Not ever.

When he realised Webster was staring back, he cleared his throat and folded his arms.

‘Is that why he helped you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The old man, did he help you to feel better? To stop feeling sad?’

‘Maybe.’

‘What was his name?’

‘Gudgeon.’ Webster let out a long, slow breath. ‘His name was Gudgeon.’

James wrote down the name in the margin of his notes because he liked the solid, round sound of it. ‘Gud-geon,’ he said, reading it back. ‘And all he told you was to pray to
God to find St Hubert’s key.’

‘Yes.’ Webster scratched his face. Banged his head down into his pillow to soften it and laid his arms over his chest. ‘I think he helped because he wanted to know if
there’s really something . . .’ James was looking at him. ‘You know. Up there?’ And he raised his eyebrows at the ceiling. ‘Some sort of explanation for it
all.’

Neither of them said anything for a while after that. And James began doodling in the margins and gradually a face appeared. An old man. With a beard and long, flowing hair. James worked hard on
it for some time, but he could not decide if the drawing was right or wrong or good or bad. He had no idea how to draw the person he was thinking about. Or even if he existed at all. He wrote a
name beside it. All three letters of it.

When he woke, it was still dark. The lights in the car park made the blinds soft and yellow around their edges.

Webster was muttering in his sleep. The night before in the car had been the same. He had dreamt loudly, with his head lolled back in the driver’s seat and the greatcoat wrapped round him.
But now it seemed worse with the bedsheets tight across him. As though it was an illness that had seeped to the surface. Legs kicked. Mattress springs creaked as he moved. His head flashed from
side to side over the pillow. James wondered if Webster was dreaming about the night he had been attacked. He was unsure whether to wake him up or not.

Suddenly, the muttering stopped.

Webster rolled over. He opened his eyes and stared straight at James, the blue around his pupils more electric than ever before, the black of his hair richer than a thundercloud. James cried
out, afraid. But Webster did not flinch. His face was earnest.

‘I killed a little girl in Iraq. All I did was give her a bottle of water because it was so hot. And they hung her up in a tree. To teach everyone else in the village a lesson, so nobody
would speak to our unit. All for a bottle of water.’

In the immediate silence they lay staring at each other, across the gap between their beds. And James sensed that the space beside him was as deep as a canyon and he was too afraid to move. Or
even speak.

And then Webster shut his eyes and rolled over to face the wall.

James’s heart beat into the mattress and the frame of the bed as he lay perfectly still. Heat drifted off his cheeks and his brow, and his hands were curled into fists. He had said nothing
to Webster. Nothing at all.

He turned over on to his side and stared into the dirty beige stripes on the wallpaper and listened to the patter of rain starting up against the window, telling himself that Webster had been
dreaming. That all this now was a dream of his own making too. But, the moment he closed his eyes, he knew he was not dreaming, he was wide awake, and it broke him out into a sweat that chilled
him.

His mind ticked hard.

In the dark behind his eyes he saw the face of a dead girl in a faraway dusty land. And, as he tried to push her back into the dark, the girl became someone. A little younger than him.
Brown-skinned. Wearing a grubby, loose dress with blue flip-flops. Bright half-moons on her toenails. A thin silver bangle round her ankle. She was dangling from the branch of a tree. Drifting like
a wind chime. An empty plastic bottle lay beneath her on the dusty orange ground, its blue top spun off, a dark wet patch showing where the water had seeped away. Men and women were staring.
Wailing. Weeping more tears than would ever fit into that bottle.