Turquoiselle Page 9

  “Here, Mrs Joan,” said Heavy, kindly.

  Presently stunned, reason switched off, all she said was, “Thank you.” And held the puppy tight.

  Heavy came nextly to Andy, and they walked on up the road.

  Nobody thundered after Heavy. Nobody called out to him, tried to assault or arrest or congratulate him. Nobody seemed to know quite what had occurred. Andy included himself in that.

  When they reached the turn-off, Andy stopped.

  “Heavy, how did you do that?”

  “What?” Heavy asked amiably.

  “That dog. How did you –?”

  “Didn’t want him squashed,” said Heavy. “I’ve got money for an ice-chrome. You want one?”

  “He’s not supposed to run,” Andy said now, standing on the grass field at Sucks, as the sturdy games teacher pounded up, red as any London bus and scowling with entirely extraneous wrath.

  “Who are you?” he snarled. He was breathless after all despite his own constant work-outs and joggings. “Why aren’t you in your class?”

  “Free period, sir,” lied Andy. The second lie. “But this boy isn’t supposed to run.” Andy nodded at Heavy, who waited, smiling cordially, as if none of this was other than a civil discussion between civilised men, or had anything directly to do with him.

  “Why not?”

  “His chest, sir.”

  “I see,” said the teacher, furious to be cheated of his prey. “Then why didn’t he say so himself?”

  “Well, sir, he’s... a bit – er. You know.”

  “Mental,” supplied the games teacher, his utter scorn and irritation precluding any sop to the PC views that were not yet properly in place. Let alone to mere decency. “Go for a walk then,” he scowl-snarled at Heavy. “Brisk as you can. The size of you, you need to lose some of that blubber. You, what’s your name?”

  “Peter Coombs,” said Andy promptly. Lucky Lie Three.

  “OK, Coombs, you go with him. Try to wake him up.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The red bus went sprinting off, thumping down its human wheels, as if redundantly to make the point. Failing to make it.

  “Isn’t the sky blue?” asked Heavy.

  “Yes,” Andy said.

  Nine

  When he and Sara lived in the flat above the off-licence, regularly there had been a rising smell of alcohol. It had its origins less in the shop than in the carelessness of some customers who, having bought their cans of lager or bottles of cheap wine, opened them instantly once outside, and generally spilled some in their haste. Or else to honour the gods.

  Their very first flats had stunk of stale alcohol spills too, and more intimately, from drink detonated on the premises. Or projectiled or urinated out later on: his father’s offerings.

  Carver did not really like alcohol, or its smell, that much. It had near associations with violence and claustrophobia.

  To smell it now, so strongly, as gradually he drifted back from wherever he had been, was disorientating. Nauseating.

  Carver did not move. He did not open his eyes. It was dark, he could tell easily enough without doing so. He must have gone to bed and fallen asleep, although he did not recall this. Had he been untypically drinking – knocked over the glass – not cared to clear up the mess?

  Something was wrong with him, then. He must have felt ill. Why had that been? The lack of sleep, the phone calls (Donna, the persistent messageless robot, the male voice that said Silvia...) Or was it something to do with the decoy drive and the grey man on the train. Or the other man – the man by the – shed –

  Despite himself, Carver’s lids flicked back.

  And, as he had suspected, it was pitch black; he could see nothing.

  Where were the windows?

  There were no windows.

  He was not out on the concrete at the garden’s end, by the shed. He was not in a familiar house off a lane in a wood beyond a village. He was somewhere else. Somewhere that blared with the stench of stale beer and wine and whisky, that had neither a soundtrack nor a helpful visual. Hear no evil, see no evil: he could only smell evil. And feel it, under his back, his head. His hands, which he could not move since his wrists, like his ankles, were intransigently fastened down.

  Automatically he stopped holding his breath. He heard himself breathe, ragged and needy. Then he heard himself speak, in a soft, rational tone. “Hello.”

  But the pitch-black did not answer. It was cold, and the cold did not answer either. Only the stink, stinking.

  Carver lay still. His head thrummed, not painful, too hollow to conjure that. When he fell he had hit his head on the hard concreted earth. Just as Cox did, and Ebony, when Heavy pushed them. Had somebody pushed Carver? Somebody had done something to Carver. Done it in that second, that split second that Heavy rose up from death on the road with the living dog in his arms and Andy finally saw the unknown man standing outside the shed, lit by its turquoise radiance, was none other than Robby Johnston in an adapted rubbery diving suit.

  Scar, he thought.

  I have reached the Third Scar.

  My mother was a scar and my monstrous father was a scar. I am the third scar.

  And I am on the scar, the rocky outcrop, in some high lightless cave, where once contraband booze was stored, and has leaked. Locked from the sun and the moon and the stars. But not the scars.

  I also am scarred.

  By birth, by living. My Third Scar will be death.

  Or add an ‘e’, he thought. Scare. I was scared as a kid.

  Again he drifted. Calmly he thought And am I scared now?

  Ten

  Sara, when he was a young child, had been very good-looking. She was in her mid-twenties then.

  (His father had been perhaps good-looking too. But excessive drink and bouts of manic fury, drunk or sober, had cancelled most of that before Andy was five. And he had scarcely any illusion of it left when Sara and Andy escaped.)

  Sara did not drink seriously. But she smoked cigarettes extensively, forty to sixty a day. Later, slowly, agonisingly, she gave up, not being able to afford the rising prices.

  By the time Andy was fifteen, Sara was in her early thirties, and her looks were beginning to wash off her like make-up.

  He came back that day about 5 p.m., dissociated from his wanderings about central London; it was an overcast sullen evening, the grey ‘architectural’ buildings had melded with the sky. Basically, he had run out of things he wanted to do.

  At this point Andreas Carver, (or Cava, like the wine and champagne), seldom or never visited Sackville Secondary. And coming upstairs to the flat over the off-licence, he wore his ordinary uniform of jeans, shirt and jacket, which certainly was not theirs.

  Opening the door – he had a key, as he always had – he saw Sara immediately, sitting on the skimpy pinkish sofa. As a rule, she was not home yet, not today, but out cleaning, with a flock of hapless others, the Devonshire Centre off the High Street. But instead here she perched, nervilly drab in the middle of her spilling blonde strings of hair. And opposite her, on the best chair, which was a sort of mottled green-brown in colour, like a shat-on cabbage, was a guy in a suit.

  It was a curious suit, too. Inevitably, a suit looked old-fashioned, but conversely it was right up to date, and sharp as a new razor blade. Deep grey, like the evening, and London, and Andy’s mood. And the mood now in the flat.

  Sara’s pale bony face flashed about.

  “Andy,” she said, desperately, “this is–”

  “That’s OK, Mrs Carver.” The man spoke with total reassuring self-assurance, false as hell. The sort of voice-over you might expect on the crashing train or plane or rocket-ship – No need to be alarmed. Please stay seated and enjoy the view. A combine of rich fudge – and malice – enormous sympathy, empathy – and utter frigid indifference.

  Andy heard that faultlessly and knew it, even if perhaps he could not, then, have labelled it with total accuracy. Faker. Taker. Snake.

  “You have
n’t been going to school, Andrew, have you.” (Not a question.) “Why’s that?” (And this was a question? Andy did not reply. The suited man regarded him with a half-smile, not friendly, nor inviting confidence, nor angry, but something – something.) “I think various people have spoken to you about this, Andrew. And to your mother. Outlining the possible consequences of your non-attendance.” (Sara had gone into the kitchen, another miniscule space packed with minute sink, three thin cupboards, a miniaturised fridge, and an electric cooker of unwilling temperament – they consumed a lot of takeaways – to make the suit coffee. Andy had asked for coffee too, but Sara had not acknowledged his request, perhaps thinking it publically unfitted to a growing youth just fifteen.) “It seems,” said the suit, “you’re not keen on school.”

  You could not call him a suit, really. He dominated the suit, somehow. At first it was what you saw, then you saw him, and the suit much less. You only saw his shirt because it was blue, and his eyes were blue. Vivid blue. Contacts, maybe. He had brownish hair, well-cut in a way his generation – late thirties, early forties – favoured – a bit long, loose, hankering back to the liberations of the Seventies. (It vaguely suggested itself to Andy that in twenty-five more years he too would be around the age of this man now, and the man would be, perhaps, in his sixties. Heavy might have pointed this weird sort of actuality out; Andy, by now often in contact with Heavy, had partially picked up the peculiar mind-set. Though to Andy, of course, at fifteen, trapped for the moment in the flat with the suit, it was a floating concept. More immediately he could smell the coffee, instant and cheap, and below that the faintly greasy underlay of the room – Sara did not clean thoroughly at home, being worn out by the work elsewhere. (Or, judging by the sackings, maybe not elsewhere either.) Beneath the coffee too, there was the well-known rising hint of rotted alcohol. Last night some gang had had a noisy play-fight under the windows with lager cans.)

  The suit was called Sunderland.

  “You’re really quite bright,” said Sunderland. “Or so they say. Do you think you are?”

  A fresh question.

  Andy decided to answer.

  “No.”

  “How interesting. I’d have said you thought you were very bright, too bright in fact to have to go to classes, or obey stupid rules.”

  Andy stared at him. Then looked away as the over-vivid eyes met his. Andy shifted slightly. He was glad when the door opened and Sara slunk back in with the coffee in the big red mug that had only one chip out of it. She had put it on a large plate in place of a tray, with the packet of sugar and a jug of milk. ‘Gracious living’ Sara termed that kind of thing, with a sort of mournfully scornful jealousy.

  “Thank you, Mrs Carver.” Sunderland added nothing to the mug. He sipped the inferior too-weak brew, did not pull a face, (as the electrician had that time), and set the mug back down. “Please don’t feel you need to stay, Mrs Carver,” he courteously told her, a caring prince with his rather thick domestic, “I’m sure you’re snowed under with stuff to do. Andrew and I are fine.”

  Snowed under. Sara, a jittery, shiny little bug, muttered some incoherent appeasement, and flitted back into the kitchen. She did not even leave the door ajar. Frightened all over again, very likely she preferred not to hear, as she had not when his father had begun to rev up.

  “The thing is, Andrew,” said Sunderland the suit, “We’ve been looking at your record,” (a vinyl album of hits, a file in police archives, an unbroken achievement at running the mile in one second), “and you truly have some potential, we feel. But you’re not going to realise it by skiving off all the time. The teachers at Sacks, of course, are pure unmoderated shit,” (what? Andy found he was sitting bolt upright, as if pulled by the sparking strings of the unexpected swear word), “so frankly we don’t blame you for hiking your arse straight out of there and off to do something worthwhile. At least, that way, you’re learning about real life, or you are to a certain qualified extent. More than the so-called curriculum will teach you, definitely.”

  A pause.

  Andy now was staring full-on at Sunderland, and trying to catch his eye. And Sunderland, an accomplished flirt, was gazing instead upwards at a genuine fly that, nervous as Sara, was skittering along the ceiling.

  The fly and the pause continued.

  Sunderland spoke again. “Why don’t you,” he asked mildly, not glancing Andy’s way, “open the window so that poor little bugger can get out?”

  Like an automaton Andy rose, reached the window, opened it.

  “Go on,” said Sunderland, conversationally, to the fly, “make a break for freedom while you can, matey.”

  And the fly let go the stained plaster, whizzed across the narrow space, and shot through the opening into the dismal onset of evening.

  “How did you do that?” Andy said. As he had said it to Heavy, after the business with the dog.

  “What? Oh, that. I didn’t. It’s called coincidence. Sit down, Andrew – or do you prefer Andreas?”

  Andy sat down. Sunderland must know his true original name from the ‘record’.

  “Andy,” said Andy.

  “OK. Andy. You’re fifteen now, aren’t you.” (Also no question. Sunderland knew, that was all. Knew all of it.) “How about we get you into a college? No, I don’t mean like a university, and I don’t mean like a fob-off pile of crap. I mean somewhere you’ll have quite a bit of freedom, access to good tuition from people who respect you, and a range of choices, or at least up to a point, on what you learn and how and when you learn it.”

  Andy sat there. None of this made sense.

  “Why?” he said. But only for something to say. He had reached the state of grasping he would have to respond. Just as the fly had done.

  Logical or not, since the dog, they had hung out together quite a bit, he and Heavy.

  Heavy usually instigated their meetings, if you could call his approaches that. He would just turn up, arrive. And, after the dog, Andy did not try to get away from him.

  Andy did not analyse why not, or why he now spent time with Heavy, walking about, or sitting in the playing fields – when vacated – even sometimes going to see an afternoon movie, or watching one at the flat when Sara was out. (Andy stole these films, of course, from Video Rodeo, or one of the other hire places round about. He would have had to steal most of them, as most were over-18, dark adult horror, psychology, or – if very seldom – rather limpingly mild porn. But, once seen, and usually only once, he would thieve-them-back, reintroducing them into the relevant shop, either in exactly the right spot, or else somewhere unmatched, as if some browser had picked them up and then put them back wrongly. Somehow the security cameras never seemed to catch him out. But they were always going wrong, those things. Only now and then he did retain a movie, and then he would never view it again. There were even so by now exceptions to his steal-only-worthless (to him) articles. A habit he knew that later, if ever he had any proper cash, he could break).

  Although Heavy came to the flat then, sometimes, he never did this if Sara were to be home. On the couple of occasions he found she already was, Heavy simply sloped away inside a couple of minutes. “Who was that?” Sara had asked Andy initially, crinkling her eyes and brows and mouth which, for a moment made her, he thought, appear like a stranger and completely ugly. “What,” Sara uglily added, “are you doing with such an ugly funny-looking lump? He must weigh about sixteen stones –”

  “Eighteen,” said Andy. This was not a fact.

  “Well,” had said Sara, “there we are, then.” And she gave her hysterical giggle.

  Andy was not offended, he thought, by Sara’s take on Heavy. It was the normal one, the popular one. It had been his, before. He thought of his father then, for half a minute, big and overweight, faceless with hatred, smashing Sara against the walls of the other earliest flats.

  While Heavy though did come into Andy’s home when Sara was absent, Andy was never invited to Heavy’s domicile, whatever or wherever it was. Nor did
Andy ever try to find out, let alone gain access. Some time after, it came to Andy that he did not even know who Heavy lived with. His mother was dead; that had been established by the staff at the Potters Road Primary, even if Heavy always referred to her as if she were not dead, indeed, often suggested, by reference, he had recently spoken to her: I asked my moth-ah about that, or Moth-ah told me there are black swans, and a brown kind too – after somebody on the bus the previous day had been talking about swans, (white). Andy had very little interest in Heavy’s home life. As very little in his own.

  But Heavy, what he said, his – frankly non-human, even un-earthly – perception of virtually all things – “See, that blackbird is flying up to the moon” – “That red glass in the church window is from where they spit the comm-onion wine” – alerted, almost fascinated Andy. He no longer thought of these verbal overflows as errors, or signals of mental retardation. Heavy was like – what was it? – some oracle or prophet from some weird past history. What he said made sense some other way, or was a sign of things that could not happen, happening – some place or other. Somehow or other. An alternate reality. Or, they only made Andy laugh. He liked them. Why not?

  Heavy’s physical being too had changed for Andy.

  No longer did he regard Heavy as a monstrosity. Heavy had his own inexplicable coordination. He did not blunder or shamble. It was... not like that. And here and there too, as if a blurred curtain were lifted between them, as when Heavy rose up from the bully’s push, or leapt to save the little black dog, you could see there was to his movements a kind of purest animal adjustment. Leopard, panther, mammoth. And surely, he was indestructible? Attack and livid mechanical danger had not seemed able to hurt him. While his mad Old Testament prophet mind, rich in its own panorama, never yielded to the would-be ruination of external threats or deeds.