The Servants (12 page)

“Fine,” she said, smiling brightly. “How was your day?”

“Oh, you know,” he said. “Skateboarding and stuff.”

“No more injuries?”

“No,” he said. “So—where are we going tonight?”

His mother looked at him for a moment, and then her gaze drifted away, to David.

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

“We wondered about ordering food in again,” David said, with forced good cheer.

Mark smiled, but only in his head. “I thought we were going out.”

“Your mother’s a little tired,” David said briskly. “So—

what do you say: Wo Fat?”

“Okay,” Mark said. “If you insist.”

Mark was in charge of ordering again, and got exactly the same as last time, plus some steamed dumplings. The three of them sat around the table at the front of the room. The television was off, as if it was a real dinner. The sound of forks in bowls was loud.

“These spring rolls
are
good,” David said. Mark ignored him. David was just trying to turn this into
his
thing. It wasn’t going to work. And the funny thing was, the rolls didn’t seem quite so good tonight anyway. As Mark slowly munched his way through his second, he tried to work out why that was. Everything was hot, everything tasted the way it always did, but . . . Part of it was that his mind was elsewhere—working away at what had happened that afternoon, like a tongue jogging a tooth that was loose. But that wasn’t all of it. As he played with his special fried rice, he realized a lot of what was special about takeout food was that it was special. It was great simply because it was great, of course, but also because you didn’t have it every day. Even though tonight’s choice of dinner meant he’d won, sort of, it didn’t feel that way. Chinese

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t h e s e r va n t s

once a week was fantastic. Every other
night . . .
wasn’t the same.

Even that wasn’t really it, however. Mark’s mother had said at lunchtime that she wanted to go out tonight. And yet when he’d arrived, she hadn’t been dressed to go out. So she hadn’t even got that far before deciding it wasn’t going to happen.

Mark wondered if it had
ever
been truly under consideration. He wondered, without fully articulating the thought, whether his mother had started to substitute talking about things for actually doing them. He remembered that when she’d mentioned the idea of going into town the other day, there had been nothing specific in her plans. She hadn’t said,

“Oh, I really want to go to The Witch Ball”—a tiny, higgledy, two-story shop in the Lanes that sold old maps and prints and postcards and things, and from which during previous visits Mark’s father virtually had to pull her out by her feet. She hadn’t mentioned Brighton Books either, though their house in London had once carried whole shelves of prizes she’d found in there (now in boxes, unopened, on the top floor of David’s house). No mention of specific clothes stores, shoe stores, or anything else. She’d just talked about going out in general. As if the
talking
was supposed to stand in for the
doing
.

As if she’d never really meant to go out.

Mark didn’t feel let down by this, wasn’t concerned about the possibility that she’d misled him as to her intentions.

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m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h What worried him was the idea that she perhaps hadn’t really known this herself.

“Weather’s supposed to be fine again tomorrow,” David said boringly.

“Super,” Mark muttered.

“If they’re right, how about we get out of this house?” he said. “It’s about time.”

Mark looked up. It was almost as if David had been able to hear what he was thinking. His stepfather was apparently concentrating on tipping soy sauce over his rice. “Have a poke around the stores,” he added. “You feel up to that?”

Mark turned to look at his mother, who was taking a long time to get through a small bowl of chow mein.

“That would be lovely,” she said. “Yes. Let’s do it. The walls need . . . some more pictures. The staircase, too. Don’t you think?”

Mark did. But he’d also thought it when she’d said it before.

They ate in silence for another ten minutes. Mark was just about to put aside his fork, having eaten only half of what he’d normally reckon on putting away, when his mother suddenly made an odd noise. Her face had turned an odd color. White, but not just white. Almost like curdled milk, or cream.

David was on his feet before Mark had any idea what was about to happen. He hooked an arm around Mark’s mother’s back and had her on her feet quickly, hurrying her through the sitting room and into the bedroom, toward the small bathroom there.

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t h e s e r va n t s

He just about got her there in time, but didn’t have a chance to shut either of the doors between them and the boy, who sat at the table, surrounded by cooling food, his fork still in his hand.

Mark heard the sound of vomiting.

It went on for a long time.

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fourteen

He did not sleep well, and when he woke the next morning he knew he had spent much of the night in dreams, though he couldn’t remember anything about them, apart from one: He had been down on the seafront, in exactly the same position as he’d been in the dream he’d had a few nights ago, after playing football with his dad. It was daytime, though, or late afternoon. The beach was deserted, unnaturally so. Even in the coldest and wettest weather there was always
someone
down on the front, walking a dog or staring at the sea, huddled into a thick coat. But in Mark’s dream there had been absolutely no one, anywhere. Except . . .

. . . he could see the back of someone standing in the water, about ten feet from the shore.

Mark left the bench and walked down the steps to the beach. As he walked across them, he realized the sound the pebbles made was different from normal. It was not the usual scrunching noise, but a flapping, as of wings, a sound that seemed perpetually on the verge of turning into something else. When he got down to the waterline, he realized that t h e s e r va n t s

the figure in the sea was wearing a dressing gown. The water came halfway up their thighs.

“Hello?” he called. “Are you okay?”

But the person, who had brown hair that was thick and long, did not turn around. Mark continued going forward until the water was lapping over his feet, so cold that his legs started to feel rigid. He called out again, but there was still no response. So he kept walking, pushing against the water, coming around one side of the figure, which just stood there motionless. He called out a final time, and then took another slow step, which brought him around to the front. He did not want to know who this person was, but he also understood that he had to find out. He looked up toward its face. The figure was now facing the other way, back up the beach.

Mark quickly took a few steps back toward the shore, but when he looked again, all he saw was the figure’s back, as it now faced out to the sea once more. As he lurched away from it, he realized that the figure had disappeared, and that the West Pier was now standing again, gray and slightly tilted, as it had been in its last years, but whole.

A lone figure stood right at the very end.

As Mark watched, she slowly tilted forward. As soon as he was dressed, he knew what he had to do. First he went upstairs. His mother was in bed, sleeping. David let Mark stand there for a moment watching her, and then drew him back into the sitting room, closing the bedroom door quietly.

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

“I don’t think we’ll be going out today,” he said. “A doctor’s coming later.”

“Coming here? Shouldn’t she go to the hospital?”

“Maybe. We’ll see. What are you . . . ?”

By then Mark had already left the room. He picked up his skateboard on the way through and headed straight down to the front. The weathermen had been wrong, as usual. Clouds were already creeping closer over the sea, as if they’d been massing in the night, the other side of the horizon, gathering in thick, wet clumps, planning an assault on the land.

Mark went to the skateboarding area and rocketed up and down for a while. Over the next few hours, a few other kids arrived and started doing tricks. Mark watched them without a great deal of interest. The idea of being able to flip the board, of double-ending or pulling one-eighties or anything else, had ceased to be exciting. He found that the only thing he really wanted to do was to keep pushing himself up and down, and up and down.

Really, he was only doing it to kill time.

He dutifully went home at lunch and bolted a handful of random raw materials from the fridge. David had evidently been shopping again. There were a whopping two cans of Diet Coke. Every time he went now, he came back with fewer. It was as if he was making a point. Mark got the point, but he wasn’t going to let his stepfather win.

The first thing he did when he got back down to the seafront was stop at one of the cafés and buy three cans of Diet Coke. Though it was too cold for soft drinks and he quickly

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t h e s e r va n t s

started to feel both bilious and frozen, he sat at one of the tables and drank the cans, one by one.

At three, he went to The Meeting Place. It had started to drizzle by then, but there was still a line. When he finally got to the front, he ordered what he needed, and then hurried up toward the road with his brown paper bag.

When he got to the house, the clouds above had thickened still further, and the rain was getting serious. It was dark enough for him to see a soft glow from behind the thick lace curtains in the window of the basement apartment. He nearly slipped on the narrow metal staircase, and as he knocked on the door he knew his sudden appearance was going to look odd. But he had no choice. He had to go in there again. The door opened after about two minutes. The old lady looked at him, then at the bag he held in his hand.

“My,” she said. “We
have
become fond of these, haven’t we?”

The room was as warm as ever, which was good. The clock’s tick remained heavy and metronomic. The tea was thick and brown, and the rock cake the best yet. Everything was as it should be.

Apart from one thing. The old lady evidently wasn’t so tired today. Mark hit upon the idea of asking her questions about Brighton, about the way it used to be, and that kept them going for quite a while. The town had apparently been

“racy” once, a term he didn’t understand but which seemed to involve dancing, men and women who weren’t really married to each other, or sometimes both. He learned that the town

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m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h had originally been little more than a fishing village until some old king or prince took a fancy to it, and all the fashionable people from London came down. He was further informed that the place on the seafront with the few small boats drawn up on the pebbles—near to the hotel where Mark had not been served a few days before—had once been where fishermen pulled in their nets to unload the catch of the day. This was all mildly interesting, but it wasn’t helping. As she talked, the old lady’s eyes remained bright and clear, and Mark grew more and more tense. As she refilled the teapot for the second time, he decided to try something else.

He started talking about skateboarding.

He could immediately tell that—as he’d suspected on the previous occasion—she had only a very hazy idea of what he meant. It soon became clear that while she had noticed young people swishing up and down with wheels under their feet, she had accepted the phenomenon without much interest or understanding, as one might be dimly aware that on some mornings you would find clumps of seaweed on the beach, while on others you would not, without feeling duty-bound to care much about the matter.

Aha, Mark thought.

He went back to the basics. His father had bought him several books on the subject, and also videos. Mark was very well-informed. He told her about early prototype skateboards. He told her about the street in Santa Monica, California, where you could skate down the sidewalk and feel almost as if you were surfing, the early birthplace of the sport. He told her . . .
a lot of things
.

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t h e s e r va n t s

Before long, though she seemed content enough to listen, he thought her eyes weren’t looking quite so bright. He plowed on, running out of specifics, and finally found himself talking about something he’d never really considered before. He realized that the skateboard, by itself, was perfectly balanced. If you just put it down on the ground and left it alone, everything was fine. It was only when you stood on it, and tried to do something, that things got complicated.

The skateboard was not the problem, he suddenly understood. The
person standing on top of it
was. By the time he’d finished considering this insight from a number of angles, he was sufficiently enthused that he almost wanted to get back down to the seafront and try some more, rain or no rain.

But when he looked up, the old lady was asleep. There was no tentativeness this time. He got up, took the key, and went out into the corridor. It might be that today was the day when she found out what he’d been doing. It didn’t matter.

He had to do it anyway.

The corridor beyond the door felt as still and dead as it always did at first, but Mark wasn’t fooled this time. He didn’t hang around, but went straight along it to the kitchen. He poked around for a few minutes, hoping he might find another souvenir, but wasn’t surprised when he quickly began to hear—or
feel
—a certain kind of sound plucking at the back of his mind. It began to get warmer, very quickly.

Then there was a loud noise, the range cooker belching

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m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h and coughing. Suddenly there was a fire alight in its lower half, though the rest of it remained dusty and covered in rust. Each hacking sound seemed to send thick puffs of ash out into the room.