Homing (5 page)

He followed the trail towards the library. The blood drips led through the turnstile, under the sharp, perfect nose of Miss Galant, along the carpeted floor past the computers. The librarians were busy – high-school kids asking questions – and they had not noticed the bloody trail. It led past the novels, the big print, the books on Geography and Dinosaurs, deep into the halls of Hobbies and Cooking, Psychiatry and True Crime, and on into the bowels of Ancient History. As Callum followed, the splashes of blood seemed to get bigger, but their deep red was less visible against the polished wooden floors.

There was no one else in the History room, except one little old man looking at books on the South African War. The trail disappeared around the corner, into the last row of shelves: the bleeding creature had gone to hole in Callum’s own hiding place. Callum crept closer, trailing fingertips along the Roman Empire and Pre-Columbian Civilisations. He paused at the corner and held his breath. The Boer War gentleman creaked out of the room behind him and then it was only Callum and the spots of blood, and whatever had dropped them. He coughed – to give warning but also for bravery – and stepped forward.

At first Callum thought the figure was crouching to look at the titles on the very bottom shelf. But there was something wrong: he was curled up tightly, head below his knees. He didn’t look up, so Callum coughed again and he lifted his head. At once, Callum knew him. It was the running boy.

Now, he wasn’t looking so good. His camo jacket was gone and there was a bright-red oval patch on the right-hand side of his white
T
-shirt. His arms were brown, but his face was bleached almost grey. He was holding his hand over the wound, and Callum could see something red and shredded between his fingers – he wasn’t sure if it was blood-soaked
T
-shirt or flesh. He took another step closer.

“Are you okay?”

The hurt boy bared his teeth. “I’m bleeding, man.” His voice was husky and weak.

“I’ll call Mrs Galant—”

“
No
. Nobody.”

Was he a gangster? Surely not as bad as those other ones, the knife-men?

“What’s your name?” Callum asked.

The boy hesitated. “Neville,” he whispered.

“Okay, okay. Just stay still,” Callum said. “Don’t move.”

Quickly he headed back, past the rows of paperbacks and hardbacks with shining spines, through the interleading rooms to the checkout desk. Miss Galant was absorbed with something vexing on the computer.

“Miss Galant,” he whispered. “Do you have a Band-Aid?”

“What?” She looked up sharply from the screen. “Have you hurt yourself? Show me.”

“No, I mean …” said Callum, “I mean headache pills.”

She clicked her tongue, in a way that could mean irritation or sympathy. “Shame, sweetie,” she said, but her frown did not clear. She fiddled in a drawer, fetching out a tub of Panados. “How many?”

“Two.” His mother always asked him to bring her two when she had a headache, which was quite often.

“No, I’ll give you one,” she said, squinting at the tiny writing on the side of the container. “One is for kiddies. Drink some water with it.”

Holding the tablet in his palm, he walked all the way down the long, tiled corridor towards the bathrooms. In the men’s room he took an empty Coke can out of the wire rubbish bin. While he was filling the can with water from the tap, the door swung open behind him and two men came in, bringing a cold air with them. The blood left Callum’s cheeks. Not turning his head, he peeked in the mirror. It was the knife-men.

He kept his head down. He was careful not to look directly at their faces – just like his mother had told him to do if he was ever in a hijacked car. But the men paid him no attention. The taller one in the black tracksuit stood at the doorway, his hand thrust into his pocket, while the other one, whose short-sleeved brown shirt showed the hard muscles in his arms, pushed open the doors of the toilet stalls one by one. Callum’s hands were shaking a little, and the water overflowed the Coke can. Quickly he closed the tap. Then he turned around and carried the can to the doorway, eyes down. Black Tracksuit blocked his path.

“Excuse me,” Callum said, staring at the hole in the top of the can.

The man grunted and stepped aside. Callum pushed through the door and walked slowly along the corridor, holding the can in one hand and the Panado in the other, not looking back. As he got to the library turnstile, he heard the sound of the bathroom door swinging open and shut down at the other end of the corridor, and footsteps. He held the Coke can against his leg as he entered the library, so that Miss Galant wouldn’t see.

Neville was sitting up. His face was paler than before and the egg-shaped blood stain had spread.

“Here.” Callum held out the Panado and the water, but Neville seemed impatient. He pushed the can aside with the back of his hand, spilling a little. More blood bloomed on the
T
-shirt with the movement.

“Are they coming?” Neville whispered. “I can hear them.”

Callum couldn’t hear anything, but he nodded. “They’re here; they’re downstairs.”

The blood was spreading. It needed more than a Band-Aid, Callum knew. Should he get a wad of toilet paper? But he couldn’t leave Neville alone again. Should he make a bandage from his own
T
-shirt? His mother would kill him.

Instead he pulled a book from the shelf.
The Siege of Ladysmith
, it said. An old book – good, thick paper. He pulled a page out; it made a ripe ripping sound and for a moment he froze, waiting for an enraged Miss Galant to materialise. But no one came. Encouraged, he pulled out a few more pages, then a handful – not the shiny pages with pictures, but the absorbent typed ones.

“Pull up your shirt,” he said. Neville looked at him dully. “Up!” Callum tugged at the sticky
T
-shirt. The cut below made his toes curl; there was a lot of blood, but he could see the pale layers of skin where the knife had sliced. He pressed the paper to Neville’s side, and redness immediately seeped through. He took the wad away and added more clean pages, pressing them tightly to the wound. The blood seep slowed. “Hold it there,” he said. “Push it in.”

Weakly, the young man pushed his hand against the paper pad. Then Callum pulled off his belt with the snake buckle and wrapped it around Neville’s chest, cinching it tight to hold the paper in place. “Okay, hands down.”

Neville obeyed. Callum pulled down the
T
-shirt and tucked it into Neville’s belt. The bloodstain was vivid, obvious. Callum took off his own jersey and wrestled it over Neville’s head, guiding his arms through the arm holes; he remembered his mother dressing him like this when he was a very little boy. The young man had a small frame, but still the jersey looked foolishly tight. At least it held the paper in place.

“Come.” Callum stood and held out his hand. When it wasn’t taken, he grabbed Neville’s arm and pulled. Neville rose and Callum turned him around to show him the view out of the little window. “There,” he said, pointing. “Can you see it? The ladder?”

Neville just stood there. Callum could feel that he was trembling. “Ja,” he whispered at last. And then: “Lift it for me, brother?”

Callum struggled with the catch, then dug his fingers under the window frame. It squealed up and the air of outside rushed into the room, probably for the first time in decades.

Callum turned and looked up at the young man beside him. He saw the scar running through his eyebrow and the sinews in his wrists, which stuck out from the sleeves of Callum’s baby-blue jersey. Was Neville older than he’d thought? For the first time, he felt a touch of doubt. But there was no going back.

“Come,” he said. But Neville didn’t move. So Callum climbed up onto the window sill, and then over the edge onto the roof, dry bits of bird’s nest falling around him. The window sill was at chest height. He held up his arms. “Come.”

Neville leant heavily on Callum’s shoulder with his left hand. Then he took his right hand away from his hurt side and grabbed the sill, put one foot up and, with Callum holding his arm, tumbled through. He landed on the ledge with a hollow clang that Callum was sure could be heard all the way through the building. After crouching for a moment on all fours, Neville grasped Callum’s arm with new vigour. Together they moved along the ledge towards the ladder. It was only a flimsy thing, Callum saw now, made out of thin strips of metal and half-rusted through.

Neville gripped the rungs, and with surprising agility pulled himself up. As he scaled the ladder, one of the rusty bolts holding it to the wall disintegrated and it lurched askew, but Neville didn’t even pause, just kept on climbing up to the roof. At the top he stopped to look back for a moment, silhouetted against the grey sky. And then he was gone.

Callum stood in the cool breeze blowing down. He reached out and tugged gently at the ladder. The second bolt tore away and the ladder fell towards him, and he jumped back with a cry. The ladder bounced off the ledge and fell down into the courtyard, clattering outrageously. Callum turned and ran back along the ledge, climbed through the window and slammed it down tight behind him, heart bashing at his chest. Outside, all that remained were two rust-streaked bolt holes in the wall – no sign that there had ever been a way to climb out. But inside, the blood drips led to an incriminating puddle right under the window.

Quick, quick – more pages out of
The Siege of Ladysmith
, crumpled up into a ball … down on his hands and knees, Callum inched along the polished wooden floors, cleaning up the bloodstains, erasing the trail. He scrubbed his way all through biography, reptiles, astronomy, geology. Nobody was around; it must be close to closing time.

Then he heard the voices. Shoes loud on the parquet flooring. He crawled into one of the aisles and sat with his back against the books. With horror he saw that his hands were red with blood. He took a volume from the nearest shelf, blotted his palms on the pages and then replaced the book. He took the scrunched-up ball of stained paper and shoved it to the back of the lowest shelf. Then he squeezed his hands between his thighs and closed his eyes.

He could hear the two men coming closer. They paused, so close he could hear the squeak of their shoes. Callum opened his eyes and there they were, at the end of the aisle. Black Tracksuit still had his hand in his pocket, and now Callum saw the bulge where the knife must be. His eyes settled lazily on Callum. Brown Shirt kept on going, on into the other rooms. Black Tracksuit kept staring at Callum. His eyes were neutral, but his mouth was open, showing silver in his teeth, and he seemed to be panting slightly – not from exertion, but with a kind of eagerness. Callum could barely breathe; he was sure the man could smell the blood. He stared back at Black Jacket’s face, unable to look away, despite what his mother had told him. Brown Shirt appeared again, shaking his head.

Black Tracksuit didn’t shift his gaze. He crouched down next to Callum, leaning his face in close. Callum pressed himself back against the books. He could feel their spines sliding back in the shelf. The man leant in further, his mouth opening, so that for a moment Callum thought he was going to bite him with those silver teeth.

Then Callum heard a joyous sound. The pistol shots of Miss Galant’s shoes. The men heard it too: Black Tracksuit stood up quickly just as Miss Galant appeared, wearing her fiercest look. She looked from Black Tracksuit to Callum and back again. She did not flinch or hesitate. Not for one moment did Callum suppose that Cleopatra might fear these men.

“It’s closing time,” she said in a voice of chilled steel. “Please leave.”

And without a murmur, Black Tracksuit and Brown Shirt shuffled out of the aisle, with nothing more than a muttered “Sorry, lady”, leaving Callum pressed into the shelf between the books. His heart welled with love for Miss Galant, and he beamed up at her as he struggled to his feet.

“Uh uh,” she said in the same deathly-cold voice. She held up the ruined copy of
The Siege of Ladysmith
, considerably slimmer than it had been before. “I’m not finished with you, sweetheart.”

Callum was quiet in the car. His mother was very cross. Miss Galant had told her that Callum wasn’t allowed back to the library because of the damaged book; so there would be no more Saturdays like this. But staring out of the window, Callum felt secretly happy, as if he’d passed a test. Being shouted at by Miss Galant had been terrible, but he’d endured; he hadn’t told about Neville. Craning his neck up at the clock tower on top of the town hall as they pulled away, he wondered if the young man was still up there, or if he’d found a way to fly free.

It was as they were passing the station that Callum saw the baby-blue of the jersey. Neville was moving quickly along the pavement, one hand still held against his side. As the car pulled alongside him at the red light, Neville’s head came up shiftily. Callum pressed his face against the glass, and for a moment they looked at each other. Neville slowed but did not stop walking. Just as the lights changed, he raised his hand away from his injured side and held it up.

Callum returned the gesture, bringing his hand to his temple, fingers straight.

Then the lights changed and the car pulled forward, and Callum watched the figure in the pale-blue jersey slipping behind, the young man’s hand falling slowly away from his face.

Daniela had taken to leaving town when things got bad. If trouble was coming – and she could usually tell – she’d take the car and go somewhere random for a few days. A nice little bed and breakfast, some place where she didn’t have to explain.

Before, in her old life, she would never have done this: go somewhere strange, all on her own. But the trips had become necessary. She’d almost started to look forward to them.

It had been building for the last few weeks: Thom had been irritable, drinking too much, sleeping in the daytime. She knew the signs. His last bad spell had been months ago, and she’d started to relax a little. But now it was happening again.