Silent Children (44 page)

He hugged the cushion harder as he left the stairs and felt he was hugging the peace he'd given to the boy. John's voice and the woman's had stayed downstairs, incomprehensible now. Closer to him, beyond the open door, was a silence that embodied a peace he only had to prolong to make it perfect. He held the cushion in front of him and sidled into the room, reserving a deep breath for a lullaby once the cushion was in place. Then he closed his eyes to do away with the trick the dimness was playing, and opened them at once, and grimaced so hard that a trickle of saliva ran down his chin. His eyes hadn't been mistaken. There was nobody on the bed.

His mind went out like a television whose power had been cut, and then it came back. He would have seen her through the doorway of the front room if she had sneaked downstairs while he was busy with her playmate. Even if she'd realised there were people next door all too ready to run to her aid, she hadn't called out—perhaps she didn't dare. He mustn't lose patience with her when that might give him away to John and the boy's mother. "Where are you, love?" he murmured. "You ought to be in bed. It's past your bedtime. Just tell me where you are and I'll put you where you ought to be."

There was no reply, but he sensed he wasn't alone in holding his breath. "Whisper to me where you are or you won't see your playmate. He's waiting for the coach to come and take you both away. You don't want to bother him, do you? He'd want you to know you needn't hide from me. Just think about it, love. He wouldn't have left you by yourself otherwise, would he?"

Surely that was a question she would feel bound to answer, even if to disagree, but she must be doing so in her wilful little head. She hadn't been like that until the boy came. Downstairs the muffled voices were carrying on at each other, and the threat of discovery they represented made the inside of Hector's skull feel scraped. "Come on, love, you've had your bit of a laugh with me," he coaxed. "Stop your game now or you'll miss the coach. We've got to get you ready for it like your playmate is."

She was either on the floor beyond the bed, he thought, or in the wardrobe. Without warning, but silently, he lurched around the bed. The carpet was bare apart from the black straw hat he'd discarded after his first efforts to amuse the girl. He dropped the cushion on the bed and slid the wardrobe door back, just slowly enough not to make a sound. "Who's in here?" he whispered, leaning into the cell that wasn't so dark his eyes couldn't deal with it, and saw a long black dress flinch in front of him. "Who's hiding in the house where the flat people live? All of them flat as pancakes except the one who's called Charlotte."

He didn't grab her. He only closed his hands around the flat breasts of the dress, just about where her neck ought to be. When his hands met on nothing except the slippery material he thought she'd contrived to slide out from under the dress. He clawed at it before realising she had never been there: only his whisper had stirred the dress. He stretched his arms wide and planted a hand on the clothes at either end of the rack, and heard a frightened squeak as he brought them together—the squeak of the hooks on the runner. The clothes were empty, and so was the rest of the wardrobe except for the shoes on its floor. He ducked out of the enclosure before he could give in to the rage that tasted hot and raw in his mouth, then retreated to the corner furthest from the door so as to survey the room. At once he saw what he'd overlooked. Under the window the quilt hung off the bed almost to the carpet, except for an indentation like a rumpled archway where someone had crawled underneath.

"Whose burrow's this?" He only mouthed that as he dodged on tiptoe around the bed so that he was between it and the door, then he dived onto all fours. "Which little animal's made its nest under—"

His voice was rising when it failed. There wasn't space for anyone under the bed: hardly even room for him to shove his hand beneath. The shape of the quilt must have been meant as a trick. He reared up in a fury that turned his surroundings black as buried earth, and groped almost blindly for the cushion, but then gathered up the pillows instead. They were softer, and nobody could say he was cruel, no more so than he ever had to be. He padded onto the landing only just audibly and heard a drop of liquid strike the bath.

"That's where you are, is it, love? Can't control yourself? I keep telling you there's nothing to be scared of." His words of reassurance took his head around the door, but he thought they'd had the opposite effect to the one he'd intended when a gush of liquid spattered the bath. Then he saw that the solitary spout of the taps had released it into the dim trough. He could see nowhere else in the room for the girl to hide, and he was backing out past the ajar door when he glimpsed her shoes in the mirror.

They were behind the door—she was. "Now I lay you down," he mouthed, and sprang around the door, a pillow poised in each hand. They met with a soft thump where her head ought to have been. Only her shoes were hiding behind the door. Had they been meant to delay him? She'd tricked him twice: how far had that got her? His gums ground each other raw at the thought of her having slipped out of the house—and then, closer than the maddeningly incomprehensible bricked-up voices, he heard her sob. She was in the front room.

She must have found her playmate. He'd been some use after all. Hector tiptoed down so quickly and deftly he was scarcely aware of touching the stairs. She didn't notice him as he reached the hall and saw her kneeling by the sofa, trying to locate the end of the tape around the boy's head with the fingernails of one hand while she lifted his head with the other. "Wake up, Ian," she pleaded. "You can. Just wake up."

She either heard or glimpsed Hector scampering across the room and turned as though to offer him her face. In a moment it and the rest of her head were sandwiched between the pillows, and he had no idea how loud his cry of triumph might be. At once his voice was under control and he was. The nails clawing at his hand on the pillow over the girl's face, the small shoeless feet drumming on his shins, were no more than minor irritations of which he was hardly even conscious as he began to sing.

Jack felt as though his father's shout were directed at him—as though it were saying that he hadn't needed Jack or, far worse, that he'd done what he wanted despite him. Jack almost pushed past Leslie as she threw her front door open, and he groaned when he saw that the fence between the gardens was too high to vault. She had the keys to the next house, and so he could only sprint after her down the path, through the gate and U-turning through its neighbour, up the path that felt like retracing the steps he'd just taken while he sucked in altogether too many harsh, short, deskbound breaths. Now Leslie was at the door, surely only a few seconds after they'd heard the shout, and driving a key into the lock. She was twisting it when he saw movement in the room beside it and peered through the curtains that netted much of the light from the street. The material seemed to grow less substantial—everything around him did—as he saw what was happening in the room.

A figure had swung round to stare toward the hall. Though it had an old man's shrunken face, its grey hair straggled over its shoulders, and it wore a pink and yellow dress as though it were trying to be more than one parent or to portray some childhood nightmare. For a moment Jack thought, or perhaps only yearned to think, that it was playing with a blue doll the size of a child, holding it by the pale featureless head that was much too large for the body. But the caved-in lips were moving, pronouncing a message to the toy that had been lifted high off the floor, and Jack heard the song as though it were being murmured in his ear. If that hadn't sent him dashing after Leslie as she flung the door wide, the victim's struggles would have. "Let her go," he roared.

He was nearly in the room when Leslie halted in the doorway. "Oh," she said, so quietly that it sounded as though all emotion had been shocked out of her.

Ian was sprawled on a sofa facing the television. His legs hung limply over the end of the sofa nearest the door, his arms were pinned beneath him. His face was turned up to the ceiling, but whatever expression it might bear was wrapped around with tape. Jack was afraid that grief at the sight had paralysed Leslie, and he was about to move her aside as gently as swiftness permitted when she slapped the light-switch with a force that propelled her into the room. "Put her down," she said.

The hulking toothless stooped old man in the yellow dress strewn with pink fish recoiled a step, squeezing his eyes shut so furiously that they leaked and pressing the pillows together harder to compensate. The next moment his eyes opened with a flutter of their lashes that looked as if it were meant to go with the dress, but he didn't relax his grip on the pillows. "I'll deal with him," Jack said, knowing Leslie would understand whom he meant, since she couldn't feel he was entitled to do anything for Ian after all he'd been responsible for. He was dodging around her when he heard a snort and a choke and as much of a cough as the gag would allow.

It was Ian. His legs moved vaguely, trying to discover where they were, only to drop against the end of the sofa with a feeble thump as he fought to breathe. "There you are, missus," the old derelict croaked. "He isn't even dead. The girl's not your concern, fair enough? See to your lad."

That was when Jack realised how far beyond anything he could imagine his father's mind had gone. He sent himself toward that unknown as Leslie fell on her knees by the sofa and lifted Ian's head with one hand while she searched for the end of the tape with the other. In a second she had it and was peeling it round and round his head. Jack saw his father's gaze flicker, considering whether he could reach the door, and grasp that there were too many obstacles—furniture and Jack. "Give her to me," Jack said.

"Don't interfere, John. That's what he did, and look what happened to him. Promise you'll do what you said you'd do, take me somewhere I won't be bothered any more."

The little girl's feet began to kick more desperately as her nails scraped skin off the bulging veins on the back of the hand on the pillow. Jack's father seemed to find none of this worth noticing as he pressed the back of her head against him with the pillow and snatched a knife out of his pink and yellow pocket. "Stay back. We don't want a mess," he said.

"Let her go and we'll talk about where I can take you. Let her go now."

His father gave him a smile whose ends drooped as soon as they'd twitched up, and felt around his lips with his tongue while the knife probed under the foremost pillow. "You aren't expecting me to fall for that, are you? I'd have nothing to bargain with then. Just get yourself out to your car and I'll bring her. The quicker you are the happier she'll be."

A ripping sound made Jack wince as Leslie yanked the last of the tape off Ian's mouth. The boy coughed and almost rolled off the sofa as he struggled to push himself to his feet, desperate to be outside before he vomited. He was too weakened and too late. "Good God," Jack's father protested, "can't he keep that to himself? I hope he'll be cleaning it up."

That overcame whatever reservations Jack had, too deep in him for definition, about grappling with his father—but before Jack could make a move his father rested the point of the knife against the inch of the little girl's throat that was visible below the pillow. "You aren't going to touch me, John," he wheedled. "I'm your—"

Jack grabbed the wrist of the hand that held the knife and wrenched it higher than his father's head, and was rewarded by kicks on his shins from the girl. He took hold of the fingers that were digging into the pillow and bent them back, feeling as though he were fighting dirty in a schoolyard. He felt the knuckles start to crack before his father released the pillows, his raw eyes watering. "That's not the way to treat your dad," he complained as the little girl dropped to the floor, crying out as her feet struck it, and wobbled across the room like someone barely able to see or walk.

Leslie saved her from falling, and she gave another kind of cry. "Ian's all right. He's all right, isn't he?"

"He will be," Leslie said fiercely. "Both of you."

Jack took that as partly a plea addressed to him. He let go of his father's fingers so as to pry the knife loose from the other hand, and gave his father a shove that dumped him in the chair furthest from the hall. "Don't move," he warned. "Leslie, can you take them next door? I'll keep him here for the police. Call them and whoever else you need."

"Can you stand up, Ian? I'll get your hands free as soon as we're home." Leslie helped him up while supporting Charlotte, who did her best to help him too. They were progressing toward the hall, avoiding Ian's accident and Jack's father as if these were much the same sort of thing, when Leslie said "Shall I take that with me?"

She meant the knife Jack was holding. "No," he said.

Whatever she took that to mean didn't detain her. Jack listened as she led the children out of the house. When he heard the door of her house shut he moved a chair between his father and the hall and sat in it, holding the knife in his lap. His father was rubbing his injured fingers and flexing them, and only when he'd finished inspecting them for damage did he lift his gaze to Jack. Having produced a reproachful look that his toothlessness helped appear pathetic, he turned it to the knife. "What's the plan, John?" he said in a tone of being nearly ready to forgive him.

"You heard it."

"I heard what you told her to get rid of them, but you're talking to your family now."

Jack was trying not to feel he was. Despite the grotesque dress, the long-haired unshaven man wasn't quite unrecognisable, though he would have been if Jack had passed him in the street, but the only memories Jack had just now of times they'd spent together were the ones he'd done his best to bury. He closed both hands around the handle of the knife as his father adjusted a tentative grin with his tongue. "Have a heart, John. Those kids are going to be all right, she said so. She won't notice if we slip off while she's busy with them. I reckon she's so happy for them she won't care what we do."