Silent Children (29 page)

Perhaps it was the intensified silence that made the house seem abruptly unreal, as though it had become more of a mirror image of his than it was affecting to be. The hall was pale blue with large vague pinkish flowers, suggesting to him that the wallpaper was betraying the presence of a hidden chemical. Some of the flowers were partly concealed by framed photographs, a hobby of Janet's husband Vern: photographs of sunsets with silhouettes against them, an Indian palace with its colours reduced to black, a Chinese pagoda that might have been carved out of ebony, a castle like the outline of a fairy-tale illustration waiting to be coloured. All of this was diverting his attention from the very element that rendered it so vivid. Was that the silence, which felt like a breath held for too long? He was starting to think he might be imagining most if not all of this, fun though it was—perhaps the feet he'd heard had belonged to a bird on the roof. He paced forward, letting himself feel like the daughter in Jack's book as she searched for her father, and pushed open the door to the front room.

As far as he could tell, the room was as it ought to be. The chairs and sofa draped with white lace were keeping the television company, and the only movement was the palpitation of the colon between the digits of the clock beneath the screen. He had to remind himself not to play xylophone with the banisters as he passed them on his way to the dining room, where six chairs faced one another across a walnut table glossy as a windless pond. A blanket that made him think of Westerns in which gunfighters had stubble and no names was nailed to the far wall. Nothing owned up to being wrong here either, and he advanced to the kitchen.

Apart from a hint of imported spice in the unventilated air, and the view of the garden leading to the fence and its bolted gate, the fitted kitchen might still have been on display in the showroom. Ian shook the back door to confirm it was locked, not bothering about the noise now he'd abandoned the idea that there was an intruder in the house. He was heading for the stairs when he swivelled round. What had he almost noticed?

The tall refrigerator emitted a loud click that gave way to a muted hum like an apology for having distracted him. The digits of the microwave announced a new minute, and less than a second later the digits on the hood of the oven did. The wall-cupboard to the immediate left of the window was slightly ajar, but it wasn't big enough to contain even a tiny child. The door to the garden: the rectangle of glass didn't look quite straight, because the putty that framed it wasn't. He crossed the room and touched the putty, and his nail sank in. The substance was very new.

He was gazing at the bits of fingerprints in the putty all around the new pane when a glint on the floor caught his eye. A solitary fragment of glass had lodged against the table, and he felt stupid for not having noticed it sooner. He went to the kitchen bin, which was drooping a lip of white plastic liner, and trod on the pedal. The bin was indeed full of broken glass, and he was lowering the lid very gradually when he heard a faint creak.

It was overhead in the back bedroom—the creaking of a bed, immediately suppressed. He pulled out the knife as he lowered the lid into place with a rustle of plastic. The kitchen seemed twice as bright and several degrees hotter, and he wiped his forehead with the fist that held the knife while he made for the stairs as swiftly as stealth would allow. The blade flared like a flashbulb, then dulled as he tiptoed upstairs, leaving much of the sunlight in the hall. As he stepped off the stairs, resting some of his weight on the ball of his foot and then more on his heel before relinquishing the banister, he felt as though the knife were guiding him toward the back bedroom.

Two careful breathless paces brought him close enough to grasp the doorknob. At once it was slippery with sweat, and increasingly difficult to hold while he turned it fraction after fraction of an inch. Suppose the door was snatched out of his hand? He raised the knife above his head and kept it there, even when his arm began to ache. Nobody pulled the door away from him, and he had to advance it several fragmented inches before he could peer into the room.

It was darker than the rest he'd seen of the house, because the curtains were drawn. You weren't meant to leave curtains shut when you were away—it only gave the hint to burglars—and he knew Janet and her husband never would have. Besides, he could see what the curtains were intended to hide. Someone was lying under the quilt on the double bed.

He'd lowered the knife, but he lifted it again as he approached the bed, his feet barely advancing in front of each other with each measured step. He was almost close enough to grab the quilt when he heard a muffled whimper. It was a girl's voice—it was Charlotte's. He felt as if he'd tracked her down in the longest game of hide-and-seek he'd ever had to play. How she would scream if she saw him brandishing the knife! He was slipping the knife into his pocket as he took hold of a corner of the quilt and threw it back.

The head it revealed wasn't Charlotte's. It was an old man's, lying on a ragged wad of long grey hair. It greeted him with a wide grin, exposing toothless gums notched with purple and red. A large hand with grimy unpared nails appeared beside it and reached out to fold back more of the quilt, revealing the other arm in a yellow sleeve decorated with pink fish and what was at the end of it—the hand tightening over the little girl's face. "Shut the door and give us the knife and don't even think of making a sound," the man whispered, still grinning with some kind of delight. "Here's company for you, Charlotte, look," he said, and pulled her eyes wider with two fingers. "It's the other babe in the wood."

As soon as Jack reached a decision he went back to the Haven. He wouldn't try to call Leslie again, he would go to the shop. At least then she ought to be able to see truth in his eyes. If Melinda heard him—he could hardly expect her to leave them alone unless Leslie asked her to—he would just have to be persuasive enough to convince both of them, after which they would be certain to insist he contact the police. As if to demonstrate that his mind had focused itself, a limerick he'd tried to invent for Leslie's entertainment while he was living at her house put itself together in his head.

While composing his music, Ry Cooder,
Utters curses progressively ruder.
Should a phrase fail to fit,
He'll be heard to shout 'Shit!'
Like (in German, of course) Buxtehude.

He mustn't expect to be given a chance to regale her with that, but surely there was no harm in imagining her reaction—maybe a laugh, maybe the kind of gasp that sounded like one, maybe a comically pained look that couldn't quite and wasn't intended to conceal how pleased she was, would have been, to have even such a piece of ramshackle doggerel invented for her. He hid his smile inside himself as he strode into the driveway of the Haven, not wanting his mother to ask his thoughts. He planned to tell her enough of the truth, that he was going to the West End, and he continued to resolve that when he saw her watching for him from the office window as though he had yet to grow up.

He hadn't reached the front door when she opened it. "Come in," she said, so urgently that she might have been anxious to hide him. She repeated the words and the urgency once he was inside, and only her retreating into the office showed what she meant. He'd hardly followed her in when she said "Shut the door, for heaven's sake," and was seated behind the desk by the time he had. "What did you want with that young boy?" she demanded.

"Which young boy?"

"Which do you think? How many of them are there, John?"

She was making Jack feel as if he deserved to be accused of somehow resembling his father. "I can't understand you," he said.

"You're saying that to me? It should be me that's saying it to you. I thought if you respected someone you were supposed to respect their wishes."

"I'm still lost."

"That's what I'm afraid of, John," she said, rubbing her forehead with three fingers that failed to erase her frown. "Don't parents have rights where you've been? Aren't they allowed to decide what's best for their children even if you wish they weren't?"

"Which parent?"

"Oh, John, don't try and make out I'm talking like one of my residents. You know who you had a go at calling before you went out for your walk."

"How do you know?"

"How would you think?"

"Are you saying he called back?"

"Somebody did, and I hope now you'll leave him alone. His mother doesn't want you bothering him worse than he is already."

"Leslie called? How long ago?"

"Don't torture yourself about that. I'm sorry, she wouldn't have wanted to speak to you even if I'd caught you, John."

"But she called. You're telling me she called."

"You said it, as you'd say," Jack's mother told him, and rammed her fingers between one another before planting her elbows on the desk with an angry thump that made her wince. "That's what I'm trying to get you to understand."

"And said... She said..."

"Have I got to spell that out for you? She thought she'd heard the last of you. Maybe not of you but from you. She hoped she had."

"Did she ask why I'd tried to contact her?"

"She didn't, no." His mother seemed relieved the question had come up. "But I'll guarantee you this, John, she'd have been even less happy if I'd mentioned what you'd have told her, never mind her son."

"You can't know that."

"Oh, but I can. For all sorts of reasons I can. Now if you won't leave them alone because I ask, will you for her? You would if you still cared about her, and if you don't there's no excuse at all for you to pester her."

"It isn't an excuse. I tried to tell you—"

"John." His mother was rubbing her elbows as if she'd only just noticed they were hurting. "She wants to forget you, and the last thing she'd want to hear from you is that tale you told me."

It wasn't only his mother's words that swayed him at last, it was the sight of her having needed to injure herself in the heat of her determination to persuade him, as though her work weren't taxing enough. He stepped back and opened the door for both of them. "I'll see you at the apartment," he said.

"Are you going there now?"

"I guess."

He saw her consider asking him to promise not to phone from there. She knew he'd seen, and must have decided her insistence would be more powerful if unspoken. She watched him from the front porch as he crossed the parking area, and he felt as if her notion of the right course for him to take was gripping the nape of his neck.

Nevertheless he wasn't sure what he was going to do as he drove out of the streets hushed by trees. He would have to pass the station on the way to the apartment, and he couldn't help feeling that would give him one last chance. If Leslie turned out to believe his story despite all the doubts his mother had loaded onto him, he would feel confident in telling the police, but otherwise how could he expect them to credit him if even Leslie didn't? It didn't help to realise he was trying to project the responsibility for his indecision onto her; the sort of insight that would have been crucial to writing about a character was far harder and apparently far less useful to apply to himself. Maybe, he thought, writing was a substitute for changing himself, but knowing that didn't help either. Perhaps the compulsion to write rendered you even less capable than other people of changing. Perhaps you couldn't both change and write.

He was in the midst of these reflections as the bridge over the main road beside the station came into view. Beyond the bridge the reversing lights of a parked car brightened the shadow of the arch, and then the brake lights flared. The car was backing out of a bay, and the traffic would halt it until Jack was close enough to occupy the space. He felt as if he wasn't merely being offered an opportunity, he was being exhorted to use it, and he would.

He was nearly at the bridge, and two vehicles short of the parking space, when a small dusty bus flashed its headlamps at the car, which backed halfway out and then swung resolutely in. It hadn't been leaving, only lining itself up with the kerb. How could Leslie believe him when he'd already caused her not to trust him? What would she think his motives were? He almost laughed—there seemed nothing else for him to do—as he drove out from under the bridge, away from the line that would have carried him to the West End.

"Ian ..."

"Is that his name, Charlotte? Tell me all about him. Whisper it to me."

"He's Ian."

"I worked that bit out for myself, love. Were you trying to make me laugh? Let's have the rest of it. Where does he live?"

"Next door."

"Just checking you're a good girl that tells the truth. Good girls haven't got anything to be frightened of, have they? Who is he then, your Ian from next door?"

"Roger's son."

"Is he that very thing? You'll have to say who Roger is, won't you?"

"My new dad."

"Did a swap, did you? Bet you think you're the lucky girl. This new dad Roger of yours, does he live next door too?"

"At home with me and mummy."

"Ian's too young to live all by himself though, isn't he? Who's he got?"

"Just his mummy."

"That's like the boy with the beanstalk, isn't it? Maybe we can play that later. I'll give you a bit of wisdom to be going on with, there'd be less trouble in the world if families stuck together like they used to. Do you think that's why Ian's bad, because he's given you his father and got none of his own? Don't let him scare you. Does he scare you?"

"Sometimes."

"He did with that knife, didn't he, waving it about like that. Don't worry, I've got it safe. Nobody's going to be using it for anything, I hope. It was bad of him to scare you with it, but shall we let him play all the same?"

"What?"

"We'll have to think of a game that ought to be fun for everyone, won't we? You want him to stay, that's what I'm getting at. You'd be upset if he left you with nobody except your new grandad who's forgotten how to make you laugh. You tell him."