Silent Voices (21 page)

“Jesus, Simon. You always used to do this. Take control. I was fucking raging at you last night, but now that I’ve slept on it – well, for a couple of hours, anyway – I’ve calmed down. I’m still pissed off at you; I just don’t want to hit you right now.”

Simon smiled. “Thank Christ for that. I always suspected you might be able to take me in a fight and don’t really fancy finding out.”

“Fuck off,” said Brendan. “Listen; let me get this out of the way before we continue. Jane’s invited you over to dinner this evening. It was nothing to do with me – her idea. She thought it might be good for us to sit down over a civilised meal and talk.”

Simon wasn’t sure about this. It felt like somebody else was doing the pushing. “Oh... okay. Maybe that’s a good idea.”

“Maybe. And maybe not,” said Brendan. “But it’s done now. She’s expecting you over – come for around seven-thirty. Dress fucking casual.”

Simon found himself laughing again, softly, as if the years were falling away like layers of dead skin. “Don’t worry; I left my good tux at home. I’ll just throw on my Armani suit and be done with it.”

“And again, I say fuck you, matey.”

This brief exchange made Simon feel a lot better about interfering with Brendan’s job, and with his life. He wasn’t sure that he’d be so calm about the situation if the roles were reversed, but then he remembered that Brendan was having trouble sleeping. He was probably glad that he’d be able to rest his head on his own pillow at night, next to the woman he loved – a woman both of them had shared time with, at certain points in their lives.

Shit. Why did he keep thinking about that? He had a beautiful girlfriend, an emotional safety net in case everything else failed... so why did he keep thinking about a relationship that had ended before it had even had the time to begin? It was harmful, almost a form of self-abuse. Was he using the memory to punish himself, for leaving them all here to face the things he could not?

“Remember I told you about Marty’s grandmother? How she still lives here on the estate?”

He had no idea. He could remember no such conversation. “Yeah, of course.” He had to regain focus, to concentrate on the moment rather than all the moments he had lost, discarded like empty food wrappers. “What about her?”

“Well, I’ve had a strange morning, so I spoke to her about ten minutes ago, just before I called you. She’s willing to see us. She’s old, but her mind’s still more or less intact. She remembers who we were – when we were boys. She said she always liked us, and wondered what had happened to make us go away.”

Simon said nothing. He couldn’t work out if the comment was some kind of rebuke, or even if it was aimed at him. He kept thinking about Jane, and the time they’d spent together. Her soft lips, the curve of her thighs in her skin-tight jeans, the way she’d worn her hair – long and dyed white-blonde – and the sweet words she’d used to try and convince him to stay.

“Okay,” he said, shaking it off. “What time?”

“She said to go round for midday. She’s going to make a pot of tea.”

“God,” said Simon. “Old women around the country, they’re all the bloody same. Tea, biscuits, and a nice bit of gossip.”

“I’ll come for you at quarter to. Be ready.” Then Brendan hung up the phone.

Simon got back down on the floor and finished his push-up routine – it was helping to clear his hangover. Then he did some abdominal work – crunches, scissors, and a few minutes of trunk twists – before a feeling of nausea stopped him.

He always tried to keep himself in shape. Natasha didn’t like it when he got porky, and he had always put on weight easily, even as a child. He’d been carrying an extra few pounds that summer, when it happened... when they went into the Needle and gained access to another world.

“Like Narnia,” he said, staring at a patch of peeling wallpaper and studying the plaster beneath. “Through the back of the fucking wardrobe...”

He picked up his phone and re-read the last few text messages Natasha had sent him.

Luv u

call me

somethin rong?

Jesus, sometimes she acted like a lovesick teenager. He couldn’t handle that kind of (badly spelled) emotional clinginess. It scared him and made him instinctively back away – that was why he was reluctant to call her, to speak to her. She was being needy and that was scaring him off, just like it always did.

He relented and replied to her last message:

I’m fine. Very busy. Will call you when I can. x.

He switched off the phone in case she responded by calling him back immediately. The kind of mood she seemed to be in, that was entirely possible, and then he’d be forced to talk to her. In his current state of mind, that would be a bad thing.

A very bad thing.

He took a shower, got dressed, and left the flat, stepping out into flat, bright sunlight. Looking up at the sky, the clouds seemed frighteningly distant, as if the lid was peeling off the top of the world. He did not want to see what lay beyond; the thought of eternity terrified him, even now, as an adult. He remembered lying in his bed at night as a small child, looking through the window and trying to imagine what was at the end of the universe. It used to hurt his head, and he would often cry himself to sleep after trying to calculate the dimensions of infinity.

Simon set off towards the Arcade, where there was a greasy spoon café called Grove Grub. He passed a group of teenagers at the corner of Grove Side and they all stopped mid-conversation to turn and stare at him, following him with their surly gazes.

It had been a long time since he’d experienced this kind of casual antipathy. Even in London it was rare to be examined by strangers in such a direct manner, certainly where he lived. Simon’s old senses began to bristle, returning to life after years of neglect. He clenched his fists and maintained eye contact. He knew that any sign of weakness would be leapt upon, used against him.

The group continued to stare. There were two boys and three girls, and they all wore similar cheap sports clothes – no-name running shoes, tracksuit bottoms, hooded sweatshirts, and baseball caps. One of the boys – the biggest one, who was wearing a cap with a motif of a cartoon dog smoking a joint – spat on the ground near Simon’s feet. He smiled. Simon kept up his pace, not speeding up or slowing down to avoid the spittle on the pavement, and gritted his teeth.

Once he’d turned the corner, he heard mocking laughter. They’d done nothing, said nothing, in his presence, but now that he was out of sight they were full of bravado. Nothing much had changed in the years since Simon had walked these streets. Nobody had any balls; they all waited until your back was turned, or your attention was elsewhere, before sticking in the knife.

A hundred yards along Grove Crescent was the Arcade. The row of shops had always been here, ever since Simon could remember. The retail outlets renting the premises had changed, of course, but these were minor adaptations to the demands of the economy rather than any kind of improvement in consumer choice. The people round here did not want quality goods; they wanted cheap and cheerful products that would do for the time being. These days, the shops were tenanted by a DVD rental outlet, a pizza and kebab takeaway service, Grove Grub (which was the only constant factor in the Arcade, having been there since Simon was a boy), a flower shop, a betting shop, a butchers-and-grocers, a small hardware store, a hairdressers with a solarium place in the flat above, and a grimy newsagent with faded advertisements for chocolate bars and comics in the chicken-wire-covered windows.

More local kids in sports apparel hung around on the steps outside, mums stood smoking and chatting over prams, shady-looking men ducked in and out of the betting shop doorway, clutching or dropping onto the pavement creased slips of paper.

Simon entered the café, looking for an empty table. There were still a couple of hours to kill until lunchtime, so the place was not what he would describe as busy. Just a few old geezers drinking tea, a couple of grey-haired women eating a late fried breakfast, and a solemn-looking young man reading a red-top newspaper in the corner.

Simon sat at a table by the window. The plastic seat moved across the tiled floor with difficulty. The table was covered with a paper tablecloth depicting birds in flight. The salt and pepper shakers were glass, but they were old and chipped and the salt had hardened to a crust in the bottom of its receptacle. An enamel sugar bowl sat at the centre of the table, next to a plastic rose in a narrow vase. There was something black in the sugar. Simon thought it might be a dead fly, but he hoped it was just a piece of fluff or even cigarette ash.

“Getcha?”

He glanced up. Standing at his side was a young girl with her hair tied back into a ponytail that was so tight it made her face shine. She held a stubby betting shop pen in one hand and a tiny notebook in the other. She too was wearing tracksuit bottoms, but she had on a stained white apron over the top of her grey sweatshirt to identify her as a member of staff.

“Hi. Could I have a black coffee, no sugar? And, erm, how about a couple of poached eggs? On brown toast? No butter.”

She frowned, nodded, and snapped her chewing gum between her teeth. “Yeah, we can do that for you.” She scribbled on her pad. “That all?”

Simon smiled, but it fell short of reaching her. “Thanks.”

She nodded again, as if agreeing with something, and then headed back to the counter at the back of the café, where she proceeded to repeat his order at great volume through an opening to the back of the premises, where the kitchen staff was hiding.

Simon sat and watched the people walking by on the other side of the plate glass window: single mothers, absent fathers, pensioners holding hands, young couples shambling behind prams, the occasional overweight man or woman piloting a motorised shopping cart. It was a typical weekday in an urban shopping precinct, filled with those too old, too infirm, too lazy, too uneducated, or simply too defeated by their circumstances to hold down a day job.

Dirty sunlight glanced off the grey concrete paving stones, the sky looked wide and bright, yet curiously lacking in dimension, like a matte painting in an old film. Simon felt anxiety tightening across his chest, like a straightjacket binding him into the past. He thought again of his old friends, and the short journey they’d made from Beacon Green to the Needle. Still, after all this time, he struggled to remember why they had really gone to the tower block that night. They were following someone, he was certain of that; but he had no idea who that person might have been, or even if it had been a person at all. Maybe it was an animal: a stray dog, or a badger leaving its sett on the Green. But no, he had a definite image of them trailing a figure – following from a distance, like spies.

He also knew that it had been his idea. He had convinced the other two to take part in the plan, to leave the den they’d made and pursue whoever it was had been abroad that night. The memories were so close, yet still they remained out of reach. He was like a shipwrecked man swimming towards a shore that never seemed to get any closer, no matter how far and how hard he swam.

“Here’s your coffee.”

Simon turned around and smiled at the waitress. She didn’t smile back. Her hand was still on the handle of the coffee cup, and she snatched it away as if she were afraid he might touch her.

“Thanks,” he said.

She took a step back, away from the table, but did not move away. Curling up one side of her mouth, she folded her arms across her small breasts. “Can I ask you a question?”

Simon picked up his cup, took a mouthful of coffee and put it back down again. The coffee was bitter, but at least it was hot. “Yeah, sure. Why not?”

“You’re one of them, aren’t you?”

Simon shook his head. “I’m sorry... what do you mean?”

She glanced down at her feet and then back up again, looking at his face but not quite at his eyes. He realised that she had not made direct eye contact with him since he’d sat down. “You’re one of them three lads – the ones who went missing all those years ago.”

“How do you know about that, then? You must be – what, all of eighteen? You weren’t even born when it happened.”

She sighed, shrugged her narrow shoulders. “My mam used to know Marty Rivers. She went to school with you, a couple of years above. She talks about it when she’s drunk. She even kept the newspaper: the report about how the three of you went into the Needle and didn’t come out again for a whole weekend. She says that something bad happened to you in there. She used to tell us – me and my brother – to keep us away from that place.” She tilted her head in the direction of the tower block, just in case he was under any illusion as to where she meant.

“Yes, my name’s Simon. I was one of the boys. I’m surprised anyone even remembers us... what’s your mum’s name?”

“Sheila Dyson.”

The name rang a bell. He had an image of a mousey older girl with hair that looked as if it was never washed, a pale complexion, and heavy shoes. “Yes, I think I remember her. Didn’t she go out with Marty for a while, before you were born?”

“Dunno,” said the girl, losing interest now that his big secret was out. “Maybe. She screwed around back then.”

Simon laughed softly. “That’s very candid of you.”

The girl shrugged again. “She’s a slut, my mam. And a drunk. Always was.”