The One Safe Place (39 page)

"I hope it won't come to that, but if we do?"

"I was only going to say that the police had a movie crew with them when they were here. Assuming they haven't junked the film, since they won't be able to broadcast it now I'm not to be taken to court, they'll have footage of Marshall."

"Well look into that should it become necessary, but we wouldn't normally use television until a certain period has elapsed."

His taking pity on her only made her feel more apprehensive. He wasn't about to specify the period unless she forced him to, and she told herself that she would never need to know. "So," she said, feeling stupid for asking even before she did, "what do I do now?"

"We'll contact you the moment we have any news. Will you be teaching tomorrow?"

She found she hadn't wanted to be forced to think that far ahead. "I... shouldn't think so. I'm not sure."

"I'll take a work number, shall I, just in case."

Giving him the information felt like inviting worse than she wanted to imagine, but what else could she do? She was on the doorstep now, and the two policemen were outside, their blue uniforms rendered black again by the night between the lonely lamps of the deserted street. Askew poised his pen, and she made the numbers come out of her mouth. The last digit had just left her when the phone rang at her back.

It was Marshall. She wouldn't have been able to say how she knew, but she saw the police read her conviction in her face. She dashed into the house, away from their scepticism, and flung out one hand to grab the receiver before the answering machine could beat her to the call. Her fingertips knocked the receiver across the table, but she had it as it toppled over the edge, and brought it to her face. "Yes?" she said breathlessly. "Hello?"

Though the response was faint, it pierced deep into her. It was a squeal lasting less than a second—a strangled cry. She pressed the receiver against her cheek so hard it bruised the bone. "Hello," she pleaded, and heard the noise again, and again, and recognised it as the squeal of the door of a phone booth, opening and closing in a wind. She could hear the wind too, a cold thin sound, and even the creak of the cord from which the receiver in the booth was dangling. Whoever had wanted to speak to her, the night had taken them.

Marshall was trying to lie absolutely still. He had to stay like that to give the pills his friend had fed him time to finish working. Waves of heat kept passing through him, starting at his marshmallow feet and oozing the length of his defrosting body until they emerged from the top of his head, but though the sensation of something hatching from his scalp made him shudder, he'd more or less stopped shivering. So long as he held his hands over his face to ward off the stale smells of the bed, he wouldn't have to move. What was happening to him was only like having a nightmare, the worst he'd ever had, and he kept almost wakening from it and believing that this time he might find he was home in bed. He could let himself imagine that, because soon he would be. His friend Darren had gone to phone and tell Marshall's mother where to find him.

Darren had advised him not to move, and Darren's mother was a nurse. So much Marshall had figured out from the way Darren had diagnosed him and been able to provide the right medicine. Marshall was hoping she would come off duty soon and examine him. Meanwhile he could only try to keep his eyes shut as the nightmare rushed him again. He saw himself treading on an anthill like the one he'd overlooked when he was six years old in West Palm Beach, and felt another wave of heat drive the ants out of the holes in his scalp. He had to take a hand away from his face long enough to dig his fingertips into his skull to close as many of the holes as he could locate. Now Max and Vic were forcing his mother to her knees so that George S. could urinate on her, except that as she raised her face into the stream and opened her mouth Marshall saw that the figure standing straddle-legged wasn't George S. but his own father. He smashed a fist into the face that was mirroring his own lopsided grin, and felt his knuckles tingle as his father's head shattered like a wrecked house. He trampled on the eyeballs and ground bits of bone and flesh under his heels, but the lips continued mouthing at him from the mud however much he kicked and stamped on them. "Are you home?" the bruised lips persisted in asking, each question popping a bubble of blood. "Are you home yet?" they asked, until Marshall had to open his eyes so as to stop seeing them—to stop having them inside him.

The room shuddered on his behalf, and as it steadied he was able to hope for a moment that it would prove to be his. No, it was strewn with unfamiliar clothes, even if some of them were the kind he would wear. Could they be clothes he'd forgotten he'd acquired since emigrating to Britain? Maybe he'd forgotten this was now his room. He didn't mind if it was, so long as it kept still—so long as it and all its contents stopped threatening to change.

Even worse than that was feeling the same threat inside himself. All the unbearably shameful dreams he'd just had must be part of him, and they showed him he was someone he couldn't bear to know. Maybe he was the boy the smelly room belonged to, or maybe he would be. He was peering out at the clothes which writhed and resettled themselves against the stained walls when he heard someone running toward him.

He'd been hearing voices ever since his friend had left him, but he'd thought they were on television in the next house. Only the footsteps were outside the bedroom door, and now he realised that the voices had been too. Had they been talking about him—about their plans for him? He used his heels to drag himself farther under the quilt, and clapped his hands over his face, praying that would make him less conspicuous as the door burst open, flinging a gob of pale light off the slab of itself, and launched a figure at him.

It was Darren, who picked up a receptacle in which he must want Marshall to provide a sample and emptied it over his own head. As Marshall saw it was a baseball cap, Darren towered over him and began to gabble in his face words that smelled of teeth. "You stay like that. There's someone downstairs you won't want to see. Don't come out till I tell you they've gone."

Had he called Marshall's mother? Marshall was thumbing his lips open behind his hand to whisper the question so that nobody else would hear when Darren hurried out of the room and slammed the door, which sucked the gob of light back onto itself. His footsteps clattered downstairs, and Marshall felt his own spongy body emitting moisture as it struggled to follow. How could he bear to wait when he didn't know about his mother? Then he heard the mutter of a man's voice which sounded as though it was chewing its way through the floor toward him, and he huddled into his lair. If that was the someone his friend had warned him about, he could hear why. He strained his fluttering ears to hear what the voice was saying—please God, not about him—and heard his friend's footsteps go along the hall and out of the house.

He must be going to phone Marshall's mother. Of course he hadn't had a chance earlier, because the voices had started immediately he'd first left the room, and Marshall had to be as brave as it took now that he was left alone with them. Though now he could hear that one was a woman's, and mustn't she be the nurse? The inkling of hope made the private ward shift, so that he couldn't tell if it was dismayingly enormous or only the size of his head. He eased the quilt off himself, sweating each time he heard it rustle, and lowered himself head first to the floor, testing the boards for creaks with his clammy palms. At last he dared to let his knees touch the wrinkled grubby carpet, and began to crawl toward the door.

He was engrossed in crawling, in the texture of the carpet beneath his increasingly dirty hands, when he heard footsteps heavier than Darren's enter the house. "Back room, is it, burn?" a new man's voice jabbed, catching him in the stomach.

Marshall dragged his knees between his fists and crouched over himself for longer than it took him to be sure the man wasn't talking about this bedroom. He wanted to meet the owner of the voice even less than the one who had been speaking to the woman. Even his impression that the floor was extruding splinters through the carpet into his knuckles was unable to move him. Footsteps marched in and out of the house, and then the front door shook it. The footsteps tramped along the hall, and all the voices were shut in a room.

Marshall lowered himself onto his base, his outstretched legs cracking. He picked at his knuckles with his fingernails, unable to judge whether he was finding any splinters, until it occurred to him that he had to creep out of the house while the people whom he wouldn't want to meet were out of sight—only where were his shoes? Hadn't he left them by the bed?

He scuttled across the floor, forgetting to be silent, and heaved the quilt onto the mattress. There were his trainers, and near them in the dust he saw the dull glint of a seven-sided twenty-pence coin. He would have taken it except that he'd be stealing from his friend, who had only taken Marshall's money to keep it safe. He was dragging both fat white animals by their thin leashes from under the bed when he heard his friend come into the house.

His footsteps stopped some way along the hall, where they were met by the worst of the voices, sounding murderous. He mustn't get into trouble, not when he had a message for Marshall. Marshall crawled fast across the carpet, in time to hear the other man's voice say, "Come in as long as you've seen it, Darren, and shut the door."

He mustn't until he'd given Marshall the message. Marshall staggered to his feet and lurched at the doorknob just as a door slammed downstairs and Darren's voice joined the others in the room. Marshall twisted the knob and pulled the bedroom door open, not least to get rid of the sight of the parody of himself which had come squirming out of the painted surface, and hung onto the frame with both hands. The voices had captured his friend, or could Marshall save him? He sounded as though he didn't want to be saved. Was he trying to distract them so that Marshall could escape?

Marshall pried his fingers loose from the doorframe and sent himself toward the bed. Surely his friend wouldn't mind if he took the twenty pence—it could be deducted from the money Darren was holding. Marshall clawed the coin and some wedges of dust off the carpet, and buried it as deep in his pocket as it would go. He sat on the edge of the bed, which sagged like a rotten branch, and wound the laces round his fingers to coax his trainers to him.

So long as the voices stayed in the room he felt relatively safe. He turned the shoes so that the toes were pointing away from him, and dug his left foot into the shoe on the left, then wrenched it off and tried the other shoe. That seemed to fit better, but not well enough, so that he wondered if he'd commandeered some of Darren's trainers by mistake until he saw he'd poked the tongue into the shoe. He pulled it out, though it wriggled moistly, and pinched the other tongue between finger and thumb while he inserted his right foot into the hot panting mouth. The hardest task remained—tying the laces—at which he fumbled for some time before remembering to use both hands. By the time he'd succeeded in making knots which strangled the laces, killing or at least maiming them enough that they no longer tried to squirm away under the chubby soles, his fingertips felt skinned. He sprang off the bed, only to realise that he'd been so busy taming the shoes that he'd forgotten to listen. The voices had fallen silent—he had no idea when.

He couldn't bear to stay in the room while the door was wide open, but closing it might bring the owners of the savage voices to him. He tiptoed onto the landing and peered down the stairs, which had grown steep and narrow as a ladder. He planted one foot on the top stair, and felt it get ready to give a loud creak. He sat quickly on the landing and stretched his body out until he was flat as a slab, and lowered himself that way, bending his knees, while his heels and elbows caught at the stairs. Long before he reached the hall he was clamping his lips together so that their aching would distract him from the bruising of his elbows and the throbbing of his arms. His shaky breath whistled in his nostrils like some kind of terrified animal's. His heels came to rest in the hall at last, and he sat up and seized his knees and waited for his arms to stop trembling. Then the murderous voice shouted, "Don't know why you didn't bring the fucking neighbours in to watch while you was at it, burn. Listen, lad, this is Barry talking to you."

How long had he known Marshall was there? Shouldn't Marshall go to him rather than infuriating him further by making him shout through the door? Marshall wobbled to his feet, and had taken a step toward the room when he realised the man wasn't addressing him. He would have sneaked out of the house if it weren't for leaving his friend at the mercy of the owner of the voice. He took another step, grabbing one wrist to jerk its hand toward the doorknob, and remembered his friend's warning. Terrified of forgetting to be wary if he stayed in the house, he tiptoed rapidly along the hall crawling with cigarette butts and seized the latch. "Don't even fucking dream," the voice shouted as Marshall squeezed through the gap, unable to figure how to widen it, and pulled the door shut behind him.

The night surrounded him, close and cold as earth. It filled his nostrils, and he had to breathe hard to breathe at all. Now he was out he felt considerably less safe than he'd hoped, but if he kept reminding himself that he was going to phone his mother, maybe he would be able to do what the man had told him—stop himself dreaming. He crept along the stub of path, toward a van that looked flayed raw, and leaned against the gate so as to lift it and the fence. It felt so soft he was afraid that chunks would come off in his hands, and once he was past he stood staring at it, trying to determine whether any had. Then he heard a bus dragging its guts along the main road, and remembered seeing at least one phone booth there.

Much of the sidewalk leading to the road was composed of broken gravestones. He almost fell headlong several times before realising he no longer had to tiptoe. As he passed one of the hunched brown houses its whole front lit up, and he flinched into the street in case the carnival ride had any more shocks in store for him. Now he was at the main road, along which a box of heads was pulling itself with its lights, past the row of caged shops drowning in the thick orange glow of the bony streetlamps. The exposed nerves of the trees writhed in the air, and at the edge of the poisoned turf whose agony they were expressing stood a phone booth.