Dangerous to Know (7 page)

“Right,” Owen replied. “Right. We should have called your secretary to arrange an appointment.”

The receptionist had been pretending to ignore us but she flinched when Owen said that.

Dad’s eyes narrowed. “Well, you shouldn’t have done this.” He jerked his head at me, then turned his back on the twins and crouched down at my side so I was now taller than him. “Jack,” he said, “I’m really sorry. I want to see you very much. I really do. But it just can’t be now. I’ll fix something up with your mother, OK? I promise.”

He reached out to pat my shoulder, but I pulled away.

We stood there in silence.
You could change your flight
, I kept thinking.
You could buy another ticket, like on the train.

But Dad didn’t change his flight. He just ordered us a taxi.

He gave me a hug, but Owen and Herod stepped away from him, moving as if they were one person. They’d disappeared into their own world. Twins.

“Goodbye,” Dad said. “I’ll sort something out soon, I promise.”

“Bye.” It came out in a whisper. I was afraid I might cry.

Herod and Owen said nothing.

“Take care, Jack, won’t you? All of you.” Dad turned and walked away, very quickly.

We were meant to be taken home in a car summoned up by the receptionist, but Owen talked the driver into dropping us off at Paddington station. We hadn’t even discussed it, but none of us wanted to be chauffeured out of the way. We were going to retreat with dignity, at least.

When we were on the train, Owen was the first to speak. “He must be loaded now. A five-hour round-trip taxi ride? And that hotel. Jesus Christ.”

Herod had been gazing out of the window, fiddling with the zip on his hoodie. Now he turned and stared at us. “We never take anything from him ever again.” Even Owen looked surprised at the tone of his voice. “Not a fucking penny, OK?” Herod said.

Owen stared at him. “All right. OK. OK.”

It was a pact.

I can still see the moment we realized that Herod was truly, properly ill. Mum, Louis and I were in the kitchen one Sunday night, eating spaghetti carbonara. Owen had gone out somewhere.

The door swung open and Herod came in. Owen had full-on dreds way down past his shoulders then, which Mum hated and Louis found amusing, but Herod’s hair was just a stringy, greasy mess. He was wearing an unwashed grey t-shirt and jeans: weird because before Herod always used to smell of Pears soap, cinnamon, mixed with the underlying wet-earth scent of china clay. I could see the confusion in Mum’s eyes: it was as if Herod were turning into someone else, a strange and terrible butterfly hatching from a chrysalis. He was also extremely thin. We were always kind of lanky, my brothers and I, but Herod’s wrists looked as if they might snap.

“Darling,” Mum said, too brightly. “We saved you some supper.”

And the empty expression spread across Herod’s face again: he simply disappeared while you were speaking to him, leaving only the shell of his body behind.

But this was the first time the Creature spoke through him.

“Mother,” he said, as if speaking to a small, stupid child, “you must think I’m a fool. I know what you put in my food. I’m not going to fall for it. I know you’re poisoning me, you bitch.”

Herod would never have called Mum “Mother”, or “you bitch”. Or said “fool” like that. You could tell it wasn’t really him speaking, that he’d become a kind of mouthpiece for something else. It was just that we didn’t know what.

After he’d gone, letting the door slam shut behind him, Mum was the first to speak. “He needs to see someone, Louis. Quickly.” She turned to me. “Herod’s not very well, Jack. He didn’t mean what he said just then. He really didn’t.”

The next day when Yvonne dropped me home from school, Louis was there but Mum wasn’t.

“It’s Herod,” Louis told me. “He’s gone into hospital. He’s going to be OK, though. They just need to keep an eye on him for a while.”

“Why?” I demanded. “What’s wrong with him?”

Louis didn’t answer for a moment then said, “Well, I suppose it’s like this: he’s confused about what’s real and what’s not.”

The difference between fear and reality is a fine line and Herod had crossed it. Imagine not trusting the people you love, afraid they’re trying to kill you. If it sounds scary that’s because it is.

Herod didn’t come out of hospital for weeks and by then I hardly recognized him. The drugs make you fat – even Herod, who was always so skinny. The next time he went to hospital, though, he stayed for longer. Much longer.

“You saved my life,” Herod told me when he was in hospital that second time. “You’re a fucking jailer – you know that, don’t you? I’m a prisoner and I was nearly free, but you had to stop me.”

I turned and ran out of the room, stood in the hospital corridor staring blankly at a poster about hand hygiene. A nurse rushed past. Mum followed me out – I knew she would.

“Jack,” she said, hugging me. I could smell her spicy perfume mixed with the cucumber scent of hand cream. “You did the right thing. You did.”

I wasn’t always so sure.

The last time I’d seen Herod was just before Christmas, months ago now. He walked down the sweeping gravel drive to meet us, early on a frost-bitten morning. Had he been listening for a car? The Peace Centre is a stately home that got taken over by a load of Buddhists in the seventies, an old house with pillars outside the front door and a thousand glittering windows, hidden from the world by parkland dotted with trees, a half-frozen lake. The roof was still white with frost when we arrived.

Herod still looked like Owen, of course: dark, catlike, but thinner and quieter. He shaved his head now but wore the usual ragged jumpers, workboots, old jeans. He smiled when Mum handed him a big squashy Christmas present wrapped in paper decorated with silver reindeers. They hugged, then Louis stepped forward. I hung back.

“I know you said you’d rather I made a donation to charity,” Mum said, speaking a bit too quickly, defensive, “and I did. It’s just I saw this in town and I thought about you.”

I knew what it was: a jumper, really soft wool. Expensive. I’d seen it on the kitchen table that morning. She was doing what she could for him: there was no proper central heating in the Centre and, despite the wood-burners and fireplaces, it was always freezing.

Herod smiled his quiet smile again. “Thanks, Mum.”

“Hi there!”

I glanced across the courtyard. A tall woman with bushy brown hair emerged from the barn, carrying a basket of logs. She waved eagerly, striding over to join us.

“Morning, Andy,” Herod said. He smiled at her, gently, as if she was somehow fragile and might shatter into pieces like a dropped glass. Andrea never looked fragile to me – she must have been nearly six feet tall, dressed in dodgy ethnic hemp clothes that billowed in all the wrong places. Always hanging around, somehow.

Mum and Louis smiled at her, too.

“Come and join us for a cup of tea,” Herod said. He didn’t really have much choice – Andrea was still lingering with the basket of logs, obviously waiting to be asked.

She gave him the thumbs-up sign and disappeared into the house through a side door.

“Poor girl,” Mum said. “She always seems a bit lonely.”

There was the usual small, awkward pause before Herod turned to me. “How’s it going, Jack?”

“Fine,” I said. “Fine.”

I flicked my unfinished cigarette out of the bedroom window. Mum or Louis had put some music on downstairs – Joan Baez. It’s what Mum always listens to when she’s in a state.

And now Herod was gone. Just gone.

Enough of the charming memories
, I told myself. The house fell quiet as the last track finished on the CD. Most Sunday nights we got a film out, so Mum and Louis were probably watching one downstairs, but I was pissed off with them for being so weak, for going along with Bethany’s bitch of a mother, and they’d come rushing back from France straight into a shit-storm of my creation. It wasn’t exactly a cosy situation.

So I went out. I took the unconventional route through my window, dropping down onto the corrugated-iron roof of next door’s potting shed. No point in bothering Mum and Louis again. They had enough to worry about and, anyway, they thought I was getting an early night. I didn’t really know where I was going, only that home was stifling me and I had to get away.

I crossed the park and sat on a bench near the pavilion, staring at the tall, narrow old houses fronting the green. The lights were lit up at ours. It looked friendly, welcoming – a place you’d want to be. Well, I didn’t. Not tonight. I still had a tiny bit of sticky left, so I got out my smoking tin (it had once contained those weird boiled car-sweets). I skinned up, wondering what I was going to do.

Bethany and I had made a silent pact to see each other. Putting it into operation was going to be tricky. We weren’t at the same school. If I called her house and someone other than Bethany answered, what would I do? Hang up?

Maybe she could call me. Mands and some of the other girls from school had rung me the odd time, like when Jo Brinkley and me were in that sappy play together. Or when I got put with Georgie Hicks for the Geography project.

I shivered, thinking of Georgie. She’s not bad, quite pretty really. But I couldn’t forget the way she’d stared at me across the table, stupid triangular graphs spread out between us.

“If you ever want to talk about anything, Jack, you know I’m always here, don’t you?”

I didn’t answer. Jono once said to me, “Listen mate, given the state of you it’s a good thing your family’s even weirder and more fucked up than everyone else’s – the girls can’t get enough of it. They all want to help you get over your inner demons. You’re sorted.”

Personally, I found that a little creepy.

But Georgie Hicks hadn’t called for a while. I’d made my feelings pretty clear. Either way, Mum and Louis were bound to get suspicious if they answered the phone to a girl asking for me. It was clear they both thought Bethany’s mother was poisonous, but they’d basically agreed with her. If they found out we were seeing each other, life would soon become very unpleasant.

I sighed, blowing out a cloud of smoke. I’d have to use Sammy as a go-between. Bethany’s mate from the girls’ school wasn’t to be trusted – she’d obviously blabbed to someone about the festival.

They could pass on messages; Jono at a push. Bethany and I would meet in secret. Maybe after a while her mum would chill out and come round, and we wouldn’t have to be so ridiculously 007 about all this. It had been pretty obvious that the idea of splitting us up came more from her mum than her dad.

I knew what I needed to do. I had to see her. Now. I had to tell her my plan.

Bethany lived in one of the big houses right on the outskirts of town – twenty minutes’ walk down past the church. But I bumped into Jono – literally – while I was still in the park. We crashed into each other just past the big old wrought-iron lamp post in the middle of the green, neither of us properly looking where we were going.

“Shit!” I said, before I realized who it was. “Sorry.”

Jono barely seemed to notice that we’d smashed right into each other. He grabbed me by the arm. “Jack,” he hissed. “I was just going home to call you –” it was a good thing he hadn’t: Mum thought I’d gone to bed early, but she might still have come upstairs to see if I was awake enough to speak to Jono – “I was down at the Spar and I saw Ben Curtis.”

I stared at him a minute, getting my head around the fact that Jono and I were now running on different tracks. He’d just got home from a festival: he was knackered. He’d be going to bed soon, ready to wake up for school. I’d entered another world, one where Bethany’s parents had forbidden us from seeing one another, and Herod was missing, being searched for by the police.

“So what?” I asked. Ben Curtis is this career dope smoker in our year – bit of a knob, really. Kind of guy who gets all snitty if you skin up and there’s a wrinkle in the spliff. Uses a rolling mat, takes it all far too seriously.

“He had a broken nose, Jack.”

“And?” I shrugged, impatient. I wanted Bethany. Nothing was going to stop me getting to her: not her mother and definitely not Jono in a stress about Ben Curtis’s nose. He’s well ugly, anyway: a broken nose would most likely be an improvement.

Jono sighed, looking at me as if I was a complete idiot. “Buggy did it. Ben owed him nine quid.”

I stared at him, fully concentrating now. “What?
Nine pounds
. Are you serious?”

There were implications. Buggy and I had an agreement. It was a small town. I’d been buying dope off him for over a year now. He’d given me the lovely sticky on credit. A whole quarter. I owed him twenty quid. It was cool, I’d thought at the time, because I was waiting for my Christmas cash from Dad (six months late, but never mind). I’d rather eat my own face than ask my father for money, but I wasn’t about to turn down a Christmas present. I’d have it any day now, swore to Buggy he’d get what I owed him by the end of the month.

“You didn’t pay him,” Jono asked, “did you?”

Well, there was no use in Jono panicking all over town. I smiled, patting him on the arm. “Look, mate, don’t worry. It’ll be fine. Buggy and me had an agreement. He was happy to wait till my dad’s cash turns up. It should be in my account by the end of the month. I’ll pay Buggy then. It’s cool. For all we know, Curtis has probably been bullshitting him for ages about that money. It’s not the same situation at all.”

Jono frowned, nodding. “Maybe. Ben’s definitely a massive bullshitter. But still. You don’t want to mess with Buggy.”

“Don’t worry,” I said again. “I can handle him. And anyway I’ve got more important stuff to think about – me and Bethany got caught. Mands’ cousin blabbed about her coming to the festival with us – you know, Bethany’s mate.”

I kept quiet about Herod and about Owen. If I’d seen Sammy, I would have told him. Just not Jono. What was the point? I’ve known Jono even longer than Sammy and he’s good for a laugh; its just everything is always about him.

“Shit!” he said, and then straight away: “My mum reckons I stayed at yours all weekend—”