The Chaos (16 page)

Then he says seriously, ‘You won’t need to. I’m not here to hurt you, Sarah. I’ll never hurt you.’

I hear my dad’s voice then, ‘It won’t hurt if you keep still.’ Lies, lies, lies.

I must have shown something on my face because Adam
frowns and says, ‘Did I say the wrong thing? I mean it, Sarah, I won’t hurt you. I just want to talk.’ 

I snap out of it.

‘No, it’s fine. I believe you. I want to talk too. Let’s sit down.’ I lead him through to the empty front room. 

He looks around. ‘I thought …’

‘What?’

‘Nothing. Never mind.’ He thought Vinny was here. I told him Vinny was here.

We sip our tea, me sitting on one broken-down, filthy sofa, him on the other. There’s so much to say, but it’s difficult to know where to start. It’s awkward, the silence between us. The longer it goes on, the worse it gets. Eventually, Adam dives in.

‘Sarah, you were calling me things – the Devil. I don’t understand why. I’ve only met you a couple of times. I’ve never done anything to you.’

I take a deep breath.

‘Okay, we’ve only met a couple of times, but I’ve seen you. I’ve seen you every night for the last year. You’re in my nightmares. You were there before I ever met you. I knew about your scar before it happened.’

He puts his hand up to his face.

‘Shit,’ he says. ‘You saw my accident, the fire.’

‘No, I don’t think so. I do see fire, buildings collapsing, flames all around but the thing is … the thing is, the dream, my nightmare. I think it’s the future. It’s not what’s happened. It’s what’s going to.’

Most people would think I was mad if I said that to them. Adam doesn’t.

‘New Year’s Day,’ he says.

‘Yeah, that’s the date, the date in my nightmare. I didn’t
dream it until I met you. It came into my dream the night after I saw you at school.’

‘I brought you a number,’ he says. ‘That’s what I see, numbers. Death dates. When I look in someone’s eyes,’ – he’s looking straight at me – ‘I see a number, the date they’re going to die, and I feel it too. Sometimes I can see it, or hear it, just a flash. I can tell if it’s violent or peaceful, if something inside does it or something from outside.’

The fire hasn’t changed his eyes. They’re beautiful: crystal-clear whites, dark, dark-brown irises, fringed with thick lashes. I could lose myself in his eyes, if I let myself … except now I know he sees more than other people, and I wonder, can’t help wondering, what he sees when he looks at me.

‘Can you see my death?’

He doesn’t look away, and neither do I. I don’t know if he’s heard me. He’s looking so intently, it’s like he’s somewhere else.

‘Can you see my death, Adam?’

He takes a huge breath in, and he’s back in the room with me.

‘Yeah,’ he says. His whole face softens. He’s still looking, but now it’s not just my eyes he’s taking in. His eyes sweep down and up, over my body, my face. It’s like he’s shining a spotlight on me. It’s intense and it’s uncomfortable.

‘You know when I’m going to die,’ I say, and my words break the spell.

He looks away and says quietly, ‘I can’t tell you, Sarah. I don’t tell people their numbers. It’d be wrong.’

‘I don’t want to know,’ I say. ‘I’m not scared,’ (which is a lie), ‘I just don’t want to know. Don’t ever tell me.’

Ever. Why did I say that? Like we’re going to be friends. Like we’re going to know each other for a long time. Like we’ve got a future together.

‘I won’t tell you,’ he says. Then, ‘Are you really not scared?’

‘I’m not scared of me dying. I’m scared of …’ I stop.
Scared of losing Mia. Scared of Mia losing me.

‘Scared of what?’

‘My nightmare,’ I say slowly. It’s true, after all. ‘It’s driving me mad. The same dream, the date. I can’t live with it. I can’t do anything about it.’

‘It’s the same for me,’ he says. ‘There’s hundreds, thousands of people with numbers on the first or second or third. Violent deaths. It’s getting nearer and nearer. Five days to go now. I feel like it’s crushing me sometimes. Like there’s nothing I can do, except I do want to do something. I want to fight it. Warn people. Get them out. Get them out of London.’

He’s getting agitated now, clenching his fists, moving his body where he sits, almost rocking. The energy in him, it’s kind of frightening. It’s kind of exciting too.

‘I think we can do it,’ he says. ‘I think we can beat the numbers, save people. Only I’m not sure how …’

‘Is it just London?’

‘I dunno, there’s more of them here than there was in Weston.’

‘Weston?’

‘Where I come from. Weston-super-Mare. By the sea. I lived there with my mum.’

‘What happened?’

‘She died. When I was eight. Cancer. I saw her number and I didn’t know what it was. So I told her, well, wrote it down and she saw it. She understood, because she’d seen them too. She was the girl at the London Eye in 2009, the
one who knew it was going to be blown up. She saw people’s numbers in the queue. Then she had to live with it. With knowing her number. I did that to her …’

He trails off, and I can see he’s trying not to cry again. ‘It’s all right,’ I say, ‘it’s all right being upset about your mum. I’ve got some tissues somewhere.’

He sniffs loudly and wipes his nose on his sleeve. 

‘No,’ he says, ‘I’m all right. I don’t need any. I’m all right.’ He sits up in his chair, rearranges his restless arms and legs. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘What for?’

‘For everything. For being embarrassing. For being in your nightmare.’

I shrug. ‘Not your fault. You didn’t ask to be there, did you?’

He leans forward and clasps his hands, twisting his fingers together.

‘Sarah, what if your nightmare don’t have to come true? What if we can change it?’

It doesn’t have to come true. If only he was right … if only.

‘I’ve tried to warn people,’ I say. ‘It’s out there, in the painting.’

‘Is that why you did it?’

‘I don’t know. Vin suggested it. He heard me screaming every night. He said I should draw it. I’ve got piles of paper upstairs with my drawings. It’s so real, Adam. I wanted to let people know. I wanted to make it go away.’

‘Has it gone away? The nightmare?’

‘No.’

I sag back into the sofa, suddenly exhausted. All at once, the months of broken nights are weighing down on me.

‘You look knackered,’ he says. ‘I’ll go.’

He’s got up now. I start to get up too.

‘It’s all right,’ he says, ‘stay there. I’ll let myself out … only … is it all right if I come back again sometime?’

I sink back down, all the energy completely drained out of me. I was so ready to fight him, to defend myself against the demon in the nightmare. But Vinny was right. He’s just a boy, a boy who’s as messed up as I am. I’m exhausted and I do want him to go.

But I want him to come back too. ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘You can come back.’

He smiles then, a lopsided sort of smile, because where it’s burnt the skin is stiff. There’s something about that skin that makes me feel soft inside. He passes close to me and hesitates for a second.

‘Bye, Sarah,’ he says.

‘Bye.’

My eyes close before he’s out of the door, and I’m sucked down into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Chapter 35: Adam

S
he closes her eyes. She looks softer like that, younger. Her skin’s very pale, almost white. When I walk past her, we’re so close I smell her musky scent, and all I want to do is put my arms round her, hold her close, put my face in her hair and breathe her in.

I stand in the doorway for a while, watching her. I could stand here for ever.

Somewhere in the rooms above me, a noise starts up. Deep in her sleep, Sarah must hear it too, because she shifts around a bit, before settling down again. It’s weak, like a kitten, some sort of animal, but something about it bothers me. I ease myself out of my sofa and tiptoe past Sarah and out into the hall. At the bottom of the stairs I look up. There’s no sign of anyone else around, only this cry. Standing there, I think I know what it is.

I’m torn – I want to find it and I want to run away. Perhaps curiosity gets the better of me, perhaps it’s more than that. This house and Sarah, I was meant to find them.
I’m meant to be here, now. I’m meant to hear this noise. If I run away now, I’ll only have to come back some other time and face it. I pick my way carefully up the bare stairs. On the first floor, the noise is still above me. By now, my heart’s banging away in my chest. I can hear my breath sighing in and out of my open mouth.

Up again to the top floor. The sound’s louder now and getting more desperate. There are four doors off the landing. I push each door in turn, standing back, like I was expecting a man with a gun to be taking aim the other side. Bathroom first – mould on the walls, a tap dripping onto a rusty stain in the sink. Then a bedroom with clothes all over the floor, a mattress on the bare boards, a guitar propped up against the wall. A second bedroom with an old sofa used as a bed and piles of books and magazines and newspapers everywhere. All empty.

One more room to go.

The door’s half-open. The noise is filling my ears now, and it’s definitely not an animal. I stop outside. I can’t do it.
Come on,
I say to myself,
come on, you’ve got this far.

I push the door further open and stand there. Compared to the other rooms it’s surprisingly neat. There’s a mattress on the floor in one corner with a duvet smoothed flat across it, and piles of clothes and blankets and towels folded all neat on some shelves – someone’s made an effort, you can see that.

Next to the bed, on the floor, is a large drawer. From the doorway all I can see is two little pink hands thrashing backwards and forwards in the air.

I walk over and look down. The baby’s red in the face from crying. Her eyes are tight shut and her eyelashes are wet with tears. She’s waving her arms above her and her feet are
going too – left, right, left, right, rubbing against the sheet. 

I crouch down.

‘What’s all that noise, then?’ I say.

All of a sudden her arms and legs go still and she opens her eyes. They’re bright blue. Like her mum’s. I gasp, ‘No. Oh please God, no.’

Like a bullet to my brain, her number shoots through me.

112027.

Chapter 36: Sarah

‘W
hat the hell are you doing? Get away from her.’ 

   He’s there, in my room, kneeling down next to the cot. He was after her the whole time. All that little-boy-lost stuff was bullshit. He knew the baby was here – he wanted to get at her.

He looks round over his shoulder. Guilty. Caught in the act. And I see his face, her face and I know the nightmare will come true.

‘She was crying. I just came up to see if …’

‘Get away from her!’

I barge past him, shoving him with my shoulder, and scoop up Mia. I take her away from him, to the other side of the room and pace up and down, trying to calm her down, but it’s not easy to soothe someone when you’re furious inside, boiling up.

‘You shouldn’t have come up here. You should have woken me up.’

Of course he wouldn’t have. He wanted to find her, and
he had me exactly where he wanted me – out for the count.

‘I didn’t know what to do. You were so tired.’

‘Of course I’m fucking tired. You’d be tired if you hadn’t slept properly for months. Just go, will you? Get out!’

He puts his hands up, backs into the opposite wall.

‘Okay, okay. I’ll go. I’m sorry. What’s wrong with her?’

‘Nothing. Babies cry. She’s probably just hungry.’

He stands there, dumbly.

‘I’ve asked you to go. Get out, Adam,’ I say, pointedly. He hesitates. ‘Get the fuck out of here!’

That gets him moving. He stumbles for the door, muttering, ‘Okay. But I can come back, can’t I?’

‘No. No. It’s better if you don’t.’

‘Sarah, please.’ Those puppy-dog eyes won’t fool me again.

‘Don’t you get it?’ I shout at him. ‘I don’t want to see you again, bastard. I don’t want you coming here. If you show your face again, it’ll get fucking battered.’

He goes then, clattering down the stairs. I hear the kitchen door bang and the gate to the yard as well. I sit back on the bed and lift up my T-shirt.

‘Come on, Mia,’ I say. ‘Shush now. Are you hungry?’ She is, of course. She searches furiously for a few seconds and then latches on. ‘He’s gone, Mia,’ I say, ‘the nasty man’s gone. I won’t let him hurt you.’

But sitting there, I’m thinking about what he said. All that stuff, about the numbers, I believed it when he was telling me. It made sense. At school, when I saw him with his notebook, he was writing the numbers down, I’m sure he was, like a trainspotter. If he does see them, he’s living in a nightmare like me, poor sod. And his face … what he’s been through.

I shake my head. I can’t think about him. I’ve got this far.
Got away from home and had Mia, and made a sort of life for myself. I can’t take on anything, anyone else. It’s got to be about Mia and me. And maybe Adam’s right. We should move away from here, right away. I’ll take Mia right out of London, away from harm, away from him. Somewhere he’ll never find us.

Chapter 37: Adam

I
’m such an idiot. The picture, the painting, I never ever wondered who the baby was. I was focused on me, only me. What a wanker! It’s the baby, the baby she’s terrified about.

Her baby.

I had no idea – she must have been pregnant at school, but I never noticed. I was hypnotised by her face, her eyes, her number.

It’s still raining as I run through the streets. My feet slap against the wet pavement, and the words in my head fall into the same rhythm:
Sarah’s child. Sarah’s child.

I thought it was bad enough being me, living with the weight of a thousand deaths around me. What the hell’s it like for her – with the end of the year getting closer and closer, and a vision of her own child in flames playing over and over every night? Whatever I felt before, about the numbers and trying to change them, I feel it ten times more strongly now. I can’t let Sarah’s nightmare come true. I’ve got
to fight it with everything I’ve got.