Hello Darkness (16 page)

SO
, I had the killer. That alien feather in the chicken coop – it was ostrich, and it could only have come from a Drama Queen’s feather boa. I’d placed Hart right at the scene of the very first crime – the theft of Ling Mei’s chopsticks. It was him. It had to be him.

I reached home and wished my parents were back. I never thought I’d say this, but I missed them. Hey, I even missed my sister. And suddenly their absence seemed weird, sinister. I was suddenly convinced that it was linked to the killings. It was too big a coincidence. I began to construct a massive conspiracy theory in my head, involving the death of my aunt, my parents being lured away, a kidnapping.

And then I laughed at myself. Laughed so hard I felt light-headed and had to sit down.

I went and brushed my teeth, which sometimes helps to settle my nerves. It didn’t work this time. There was something wrong with the light in the bathroom. It picked up some weird colour in my eyes. A sickly sort of hue. It wasn’t healthy. It was barely human.

I’d had nothing to eat all day, but I wasn’t hungry. Out of habit, I went to the kitchen and opened a can of peaches. I stared at the virulent orange slices. They reminded me of something scooped out of a body during an autopsy. I poured them into the sink, mashing them down the plughole with a wooden spoon. Then I was sorry that I’d wasted the peaches. I should just have put them in a bowl and eaten them later, when I wasn’t thinking of death and evisceration and the absence of love.

I couldn’t understand why I felt so down. I should have been eight miles high. Hadn’t I cracked the case?

Maybe it was because I couldn’t work out the motive. I didn’t figure Hart for a sicko who just took pleasure in killing – he didn’t look like he took pleasure in
anything
. The best I could come up with was that he was working with the Shank to bring down the Queens or, more specifically, Emma West. Maybe he thought that the Shank would put him in her stilettos, acting as his puppet. It made a kind of sense, but not enough to give me the satisfaction of hearing the case click shut.

But I couldn’t resist a little smile at the thought of what Dorothy would do when she found out about the plot. The chances were that Hart would be singing like a Munchkin for the rest of his days.

My next step was to get the feather, and the story it told, to the Principal tomorrow morning. He was weak and he was old, but nobody denied that Mr Vole was a decent man. He would do the right thing, I was sure. He would rouse himself from his years of torpor and slap down the Shank.

Or was I just kidding myself? Did he have the nerve, the guts, the moral muscle? Well, tomorrow we’d find out. Either way, I’d done all that I could. My conscience was clean. My work was done.

But there was a grain of sand in the Vaseline. Zofia. I realized that I hadn’t seen her all day. I needed to talk to her. I wanted to explain …
about things
. What did I need to explain…?
The important things
. But now I couldn’t remember them… My head wasn’t working properly. But if I talked to her, it would be better, that much I knew.

I’d call her. We could meet again, like last night. I wouldn’t say anything dumb this time. I could tell that she liked me. We did that clicking thing. We would be together. She’d understand and help me. We could save each other.

First I had to call her. But how? I’d never taken down her number. Numbers started to whirr in my head like a slot machine. I knew that when they stopped I’d have hers. I tried to stop the spinning numerals, but I couldn’t even slow them.

I slapped my head to
make
the numbers stop. I was missing something. Yes, that was it: I hadn’t called her, but she’d called me. Our phone had a little LCD screen that showed the last ten calls received.

I scrolled through the list. I was looking for a number I didn’t recognize. Mum’s mobile. Dad’s mobile. Those two numbers repeated over and over again. And then I saw what I was looking for. I probably should have got my thoughts together before I hit redial, but my finger did the thinking.

Three rings.

“Hello,” said a voice I didn’t recognize. Then some more words that I didn’t catch. The voice was Eastern European and unfriendly.

“Pardon?” I said, bewildered.

“Manston Dry Cleaners. Can I help you?”

Dry cleaners…? Maybe she worked there.

“Zofia. Is Zofia there?”

“Zofia? No, no Zofia work here.”

I put the phone down. Were they lying? Was this part of it, part of the plot? The boring, obvious answer was that my mum had left some dry cleaning there, and they had just called to tell her that it was ready. But if we always settled for the obvious answer, we’d still think the sun went around the Earth and that it was OK to make margarine out of whales.

But I’d lost my link, and I felt Zofia fading, slipping away. I reached for her through time and space, like the astronomers looking for messages from alien civilizations.

And I heard something, and I knew where she was. I went up on the roof.

“YOU?”
I said.

“Who else were you expecting?”

The cat came over and rubbed herself against my ankle. I noticed that my feet were bare and dirty, as if I’d been walking around all day without my shoes on.

“Oh … no one, I guess.”

“The girl?”

“The girl? No… Maybe.”

“You know, don’t you?” said the cat, climbing up onto my knees. That made me feel calmer. Maybe that was the point of cats, you know, why we invented them.

“Me,” I said. “I don’t know jack shit. So tell me, what should I know?”

The cat thought for a moment.

“That we’re all connected.”

“Just my luck – my cat’s a hippy. Bet you do yoga and drink fruit tea.”

“There,” she said, pointing her nose at the city. “What do you see?”

“Lights,” I said, looking at the pools and points of orange and yellow spilling from houses and cars and streetlamps.

“Not
lights
,” said the cat. “
Light
. You think they are each separate, but it’s an illusion. Imagine one great light, and a screen of black silk is set before it, and in the screen there are tiny holes. It looks to you as if they are all individual, and isolated, one from the other. But if you could take away the screen, you’d see that there was only one light.”

“Nice,” I said. “But I don’t get what you’re trying to say.”

“That what you think are separate things are really the same thing. The girl. The Dwarf. The…”

There was a pause into which I inserted the word: “Cat…?”

The cat looked at me, her lovely green eyes full of meaning and yet unreadable.

“It’s over with the girl, isn’t it,” I said. I don’t know how I knew it, but I knew it.

“It was over before it started,” said the cat. “But you’ve still got me.”

The cat dug her claws into my thighs and coiled further into me.

“Your lap feels bony,” she purred. “You can’t live on canned peaches, you know.”

“Don’t give me the peach preach. I get enough of that from … the others.”

“It’s only because they care about you.”

“If they cared they’d be here.”

“But they are here … the voices.”

“That’s the TV.”

“Really?”

“And if they cared they wouldn’t try to control my thoughts.”

“How could they do that?”

“The white pills. The red pills. The blue pills. Sit still, don’t fidget.”

“I’m cold. You give off no warmth.”

“Hmm. You know that movie, the one where the guy dies but doesn’t realize it, and just goes on same as before?”

“No.”

“Oh, well.”

“What will you do?”

“Tomorrow? Finish it, I guess. Tell Mr Vole. Tell them all. Bring the whole stinking, corrupt edifice crashing down.”

“Did you ever worry that the thing behind the edifice might be worse than the edifice?”

“Like a beauty spot over a smallpox pustule?”

“Yes, just like that.”

“That’s someone else’s problem. I’m only trying to get at the truth. What was it you said, about taking away the screen and showing the light behind?”

“You’re twisting my words. I was talking about the connectedness, but you’re talking about the truth, as if it were a simple, single thing, hiding underneath, or inside the world, like a pearl in an oyster. But that isn’t how truth works. All we have are signs. And each sign just points to another sign. There is no pearl, no secret inner truth, no reality behind the edifice. Just the endless play of signs.”

“Sounds deep.”

“That’s cats for you. Scratch me.”

“Where? There?”

“Yes, just there.”

I
woke up on Friday morning knowing two things. The first was that this was the Big Day. The second was that I was late. I pulled my uniform on and ran through the streets, splashing through puddles of black water.

The deserted schoolyard felt vaguely post-apocalyptic. My plan was to go to see the Principal straight after morning registration, so that he could then make his move before the Friday Assembly at twelve. I couldn’t say that I had complete confidence in Vole’s ability to take the Shank down, but at least I’d have done my part and shucked off the responsibility onto somebody else’s shoulders. There was a sort of comfort in that.

I opened my form room door and synchronicity chimed: Mr Vass was reading out my name from the register. Every kid swivelled towards me. You’d have thought I’d come in wearing a pirate’s costume, complete with squawking parrot.

“Ah, John,” said Vass. “Good timing. Take a seat.”

Not a word about being late. I knew right away that the class had been talking about me. Before he went on with the register, Vass scribbled something on a piece of paper and gave it to a runty kid on the front row. Spellman was his name. Spellman scuttled out of the room. I sat down. There were over-the-shoulder glances, part nervous, part excited. Wilson gave me a full leer, wet and foul. He knew something. They all knew something.

Mr Vass had reached the end of the register when there was a quiet knock at the door. Spellman ducked in and ran back to his desk at the front, leaving the School Counsellor, Ms Cassandra, in the doorway.

Ms Cassandra was one of those ladies who had gone grey early, but had then stayed put, looking ageless. There was a sparsely haired mole, small but unignorable, in the disputed border territory between chin and jaw.

The Counsellor was the person you went to see if you were having “problems”, if you were addicted, aphasic or anxious; boring, bulimic, or bullied; cuckolded, cankered or crucified (I could go on…). Of course the only reason anyone
actually
went to see Ms Cassandra was if it meant they could use the good old excuse of being crazy to get out of games or avoid some punishment. Maybe a few kids feigned insanity to get attention. But you’d have to be mad to do that. Whatever your problem, anorexia or athlete’s foot, the gig was the same: Ms Cassandra would ask you how things were at home and try to get you to talk about your feelings. Then she’d hand you a leaflet on safe sex and you’d be on your way.

We’d had a couple of meetings back when my troubles started. It was pretty obvious that whatever I had was out of her league, and I’d sensed ever since that she resented me because of it.

Ms Cassandra (definitely a Ms, by the way – the two states of marriage and singleness seemed equally inconceivable) entered on her sensible heels and engaged in a brief, murmurous interchange with Mr Vass. They both trained their eyeballs on me, and I knew that my plans for the day were about to be rendered obsolete.

“John?” Mr Vass looked a little sorry, as if he’d been hoping for a ham sandwich and it had turned out to be cheese, without even the consolation of pickle.

“Sir?”

“Could you” – he paused, searching for the right verb – “
go
with Ms Cassandra.”

His choice seemed not to please him. It amused the class, however, and a long strangulated
Woooo
OOOO
oooooooo!
resulted.

I gathered my gear and followed her out of there.

“What’s this all about?” I asked when we were in the corridor.

Ms Cassandra smiled at me. It was a warm, open, understanding smile, and I felt an almost overpowering urge to unfurl the fire hose attached to the wall and give her a blast of high-pressure icy water right in the face.

“It’s nothing to worry about. We’ve heard about some of your recent
issues
and thought that perhaps we’d, well, let things slip. And so I – we – thought it would be good to have a talk.”

I suppose I should have sniffed a rat, and I sort of did. But I felt a kind of inertia – you know, that feeling of powerlessness that comes over you, and makes you almost
want
to put yourself in the hands of the authorities.

By now we were at the Counsellor’s office. She opened the door. The room was the fanciest in the whole school. There were comfy chairs and a nice carpet and hi-tech blinds over the windows, and the place had that pleasant new-car smell of fresh plastic. There was even a decent computer – a flatscreen iMac as big as a shop window.

“Please sit down, John,” said Ms Cassandra in her soothing voice. “I just need to pop out for a few moments.”

She left the room and I flopped into one of the soft chairs. It really was extraordinarily comfy. As I sank into it I couldn’t help but let out one of those long sighs that people make when they sit down after some hard task. It was bright in the room, and I closed my eyes to shut out the glare. It was good to sit and let my mind drift.

I was half asleep when the door clicked open. Had I heard the sound of a key turning? Had the Counsellor locked me in? Why would she do that?

She gave me the smile again. She had lovely teeth, clean and white and even.