The Servants (7 page)

he wasn’t always aware of what was going on. David being around in London was one thing. His presence in Brighton was different. It said that even in the place where you came to get away, he would be here.

It said
everything
about how the world had changed. This person—who nine months ago had been unknown to Mark—now had control over his life. Over his mother, even worse. The voices upstairs were already quietening. His mother wasn’t defending Mark, and David wasn’t coming down here to apologize. David had won.
Again.
He was upstairs with Mark’s mother, and Mark was stuck down here in this cold room with nothing but old books and a television that didn’t get cable.

Abruptly, he grabbed the other book from the bed, but before he’d even tensed to shred it, he knew that wasn’t the answer. Instead he threw it against the wall and turned around. The book wasn’t the real problem. The problem was being stuck here, stuck in this situation.

He walked quickly over to the window.

If he opened the door to his room, the gatekeeper would hear and come back down to give him a hard time. So instead Mark flipped the catch on one of the three big sashes. It was stiff, but once he got his shoulder under it, he was able to shove it up a couple of feet. It was dark outside, though it was only half past four. Spitting with rain, too. The sidewalk outside the house was deserted, as was the rest of the square. It wasn’t walking weather.

There was no one to see.

He went and got his coat, then came back to the window.

 

m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h Put one foot up onto the sill, pulled the other up. He slipped under the bottom of the window, and then he was outside. The exterior sill was over a foot deep—plenty of room. He half-turned and quietly pushed the window down, leaving it open a couple of inches. He’d have to come back this way, too. If he pulled the chair away from his bedroom door, then David would be able to enter the room and discover that Mark had disappeared.

Then he started to sidle around to his left, toward the front door to the house. When he got to the end of the sill, he realized he hadn’t quite pictured the front of the house accurately. There was well over a yard of empty space between him and the ornamental fence and handrail that led down from the front-door steps to the street.

Hmm.

He considered the problem for a moment, then lowered himself so that he was sitting on the sill, legs dangling over the edge. The metal uprights of the fence had been painted so many times that there were no sharp edges, just a thick covering of paint everywhere. If he pushed himself off, hard, and then whipped his hands around to the front, he’d be able to grab two of the uprights. Pull himself up, and hoist himself over the handrail. Then he’d be on the steps, and away. He hesitated. What was he going to do after that? Leaving the house was all very well, but what happened next?

Then he heard the sound of the television drifting through the window of the floor above and down to him. An old film.

 

t h e s e r va n t s

All was well up there, evidently. Mark was no longer even being discussed. It was as if he wasn’t even here. He might as well not be, then. He’d work out what he was going to do when he got to the other side of the fence. He pushed out hard, before he could change his mind, and suddenly was flying through the air. He yanked his hands around immediately, reaching out. Even though the distance was a little farther than he’d thought, both hands clamped firmly around an upright bar of the fence.

That part went exactly according to plan.

But it was raining, and the uprights were a lot wetter than he’d expected. No sooner had his hands gripped them than he started to slide down, and fast. He scrabbled out with his feet, trying to find something to grip onto. There wasn’t anything. His left hand reached the bottom first, and the shock of its collision with the stone bounced it right off. Mark had an instant to realize the same thing might happen when his
right
hand reached the bottom, and then it did.

And he was falling through the air.

He lashed out, managing to get brief holds on things—

little brick outcrops, a lower sill—but these were also wet, and he was dropping too fast to get any purchase. He whacked his knee in passing and lost what little balance remained and plummeted the last six feet all in one tumbling crash. He was on his feet for a moment, but the force of his landing pushed them out from underneath him and dropped him hard on his behind. That hurt enough, but gravity wasn’t fin 

m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h ished with him yet—and very soon afterward he was lying on his back, fetching his head a solid crack on the ground. He lay there twisted, panting. He was in practice at being knocked around, but it still hurt. A lot. Above him was the underside of the windowsill outside his room. It looked a very long way up.

A moment later, there was something else above him. A figure, black in silhouette against the dark sky.

“Good gracious,” said an old, cracked voice. “How did you come to be down here, I wonder?”

Mark’s first thought was that he should jump to his feet, sprint up the narrow metal staircase that led from this basement courtyard to the street, and run away. Run down to the front. Run . . . just run somewhere else. Then he found that he was crying.

There was no warning of this. He had no sense it was going to happen, didn’t even
decide
to do it, as—like most people—he’d done from time to time. He didn’t want to do it at all. He was just doing it. Lying there on his back, with tears streaming silently down his face.

“Oh dear,” the old lady said. “Now, now.”

She’d moved to one side, so that light from a streetlamp caught her face, and through his tears Mark could see she was looking down at him with a frown of concern. This just made him feel worse, and he started to sob properly. She waited, not saying anything, as the gusts of misery blew through him. After a minute or so, she started to nod.

 

t h e s e r va n t s

Gradually, his sobs subsided, taking with them all but the last of the tears.

“Yes,” the old lady said reflectively. “I think there’s only one thing for it.”

“One thing for what?” Mark managed. His voice sounded thick.

“I know just what you need,” she said. “Can you guess?”

Mark shook his head. He couldn’t imagine what she had in mind.

“A nice strong cup of tea,” she said.

Mark was so surprised that he started to laugh.

“That’s better,” she said, and stood aside so he had room to clamber to his feet.

Her room was very, very warm. As he sat in the chair, watching the old lady pottering about at the stove with the kettle, Mark saw that she had not one but two of those old-fashioned heaters that have horizontal metal bars that glow orange when they’re turned on. Underneath the lace curtains at the window she had taped a strip of cloth to stop the slightest draft from coming in. She was wearing the thick black dress he’d seen her in before, and also a cardigan.

“Don’t you get hot?” he asked.

His voice still sounded a little snotty, and his head hurt. Partly from cracking it on the ground, probably, but mainly from the tears. He didn’t cry often. He knew he’d probably feel bad about doing it, later, but just right now he was too worn out to care.

 

m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h

“The older you get, the colder you feel,” the old lady said.

“The engine starts to wear out.”

She put two cups on the little table, poured a dash of milk into both, then added tea. From somewhere she had produced a small plate of cookies. Two bourbons, two custard creams, and a garibaldi. Exactly the same cookies Mark’s grandmothers had favored, before they’d died, one the year after the other. Maybe there was a special shop where old ladies bought their cookies, and their dresses and coats, a little place hidden away down a side street or alleyway, where a grandfather clock ticked and an ancient man covered in dust and cobwebs came out of the back, walking slowly, summoned by the
tinkle tinkle
of the bell when someone hobbled in. The old lady sat down carefully in the other chair. “The good thing is that means nothing hurts quite so much.”

He looked at her, not understanding what she meant.

“You don’t get as happy as you used to,” she said. “But . . . you don’t cry very often either.”

“Neither do I,” Mark said defensively.

“I’m sure you don’t,” she agreed mildly. “You’re a boy. You’re not
allowed
to. God forbid that a
boy
reveal that he isn’t made of stone.”

It took Mark a moment to puzzle this out, but it didn’t seem that he was being got at, so he just grunted and took a sip of his tea. It was so strong you could almost chew it. Maybe you could get tea bags from the special shop down the alley too, ones which had five times as many leaves in them as normal.

They sat in silence for a while. He’d noticed the last time

 

t h e s e r va n t s

that she didn’t seem to mind this. Maybe that was part of being old. You could just sit, listening to the clock ticking the time away, and not feel you had to fill the spaces with words. Perhaps when you’d got to her age, you’d said everything already once. David clearly didn’t feel he’d got to that point yet, and Mark found he enjoyed the quiet.

“What did you mean, before?” he asked eventually.

“About what, dear?”

“You said something about how people were like, you know”—he nodded at the back wall of the room.

“Did I? I have no idea what I meant. I’m sorry. Sometimes I just say things to check my mouth is still working, I think.”

He smiled.

She nodded at the plate. “Have a custard cream.”

He took one. “Like . . . Brunswick Cream,” he said.

“That’s right,” she said, and took the other. They sat there eating cookies together, and listening to the sound of the clock.

Some time later, he woke up.

For a long moment, he had no idea where he was, then he jerked his head and saw the old lady asleep in her chair, her face tilted slightly back.

He blinked, disoriented. He looked over at the bedside clock and saw it was twenty-five past eight. He must have been asleep for two or three
hours
. He hoped she’d nodded off

at the same time, or he must have looked really silly. He blinked again several times, hard, trying to get his

 

m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h head straight. He was very tired, worn out by days of walking, of falling off a skateboard, of lying in the rain and crying. Something must have woken him up, otherwise he probably would have slept on for hours more. He wasn’t sure what that something had been, though.

A sound, perhaps? A faint knocking sound?

Whatever it had been, it was quiet now. All he could hear were the whistle of the old lady’s breath, as it drifted in and out of her nose and mouth—sitting there so still she looked disconcertingly as if she could be dead—and the clock, still tick-tocking away to itself. The sound was threatening to send Mark off to sleep again.

He pushed himself up out of the chair. He’d better go. As he stepped toward the door, his leg twisted, painfully. He must have really banged it up. It hadn’t hurt so much before, but the sleep had allowed the knock to settle into it. Wow, actually, it really,
really
hurt. Still bleary, moving quietly so as to not wake the old lady, Mark hobbled carefully around the front of the room, past the tiny stove. Then he stopped.

In front of him was a narrow drawer, in the center of the unit that supported the little sink. He opened it, remembering what he’d seen put there. He turned, slowly. The old lady was fast asleep. Something might have woken Mark, some muffled noise, but it was silent now. She’d be asleep for hours yet. And five minutes was all he’d need.

Just for another quick look.

He hesitated. She’d shown it to him in the first place, so

 

t h e s e r va n t s

she probably wouldn’t mind, would she? It would be better, more polite, to ask her—either when she woke up, or tomorrow. Of course. But she might say no, and now that the idea had occurred to him, Mark realized he really wanted to do what he had in mind.

Just to have another peek. It couldn’t do any harm. He watched the old lady sleeping for a moment longer, and then took the big key from the drawer.

After he’d carefully closed it again, he crept across the room, wincing. His back hurt, too.

He turned the knob of the door very, very slowly, making sure it didn’t make any noise. Then opened it just as carefully, pulling it behind him again as he stepped outside. He didn’t shut it, knowing he’d have to come back to return the key, but left it half an inch ajar.

He stood in the wide corridor, his hands turned yellow from the dim light shed by the bulb he had changed. He stepped over to the big door and fitted the key in the lock. Turned it.

Clock,
it went.

He pushed the door open into blackness, and stepped inside.

 

P A R T

II

nine

The first thing he noticed after he’d shut the door behind him was that the hallway wasn’t as dark as he’d thought. Again there was that gray light coming from the area at the back, filtering down through the filthy panes in the skylight above the kitchen. It was nighttime now and the light was a lot softer than it had been when he’d come here before, but still seeped around the corner into the main corridor, picking out the edges of walls.

It remained quite gloomy, however. Mark reached out and ran his fingers along the wall on the right, until he found the light switch.

He flicked it, but nothing happened. The bulb must have gone. That was not so good. It was going to be hard to see. Not to mention that, now he was actually in here, it was a little . . .

It was very
quiet,
that was all. It wasn’t spooky. It was like being in a ruined castle—or a church on a Thursday afternoon. Mark’s mother didn’t believe in God, but she liked stained glass, and once in a while he’d found himself wander-m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h ing around some big old church while she stood and gazed up at figures made of colored light. Something lingered in the air within these places, Mark had noticed. A heaviness that said it was somewhere that had known movement and singing, and would do again, however still and quiet it might seem right now. It was like an echo. You knew
something
must have made the sound, even if it wasn’t there anymore. The vibration persisted and the noise reached you eventually, long after the cause of the sound had gone.