The Dark Inside (9 page)

The sound of a television burbling.

A cat mewling outside a door.

The beating of his heart.

He opened the neck of the shotgun. Two red cartridges with their copper-coloured ends. He clicked the gun shut and listened again, then rolled the man over with his boot.

It wasn’t Billy.

It was Swanney.

His eyes fluttered open and he looked up at Webster from either side of his broken nose, and swore and spat and kicked out. Webster’s finger tightened on the trigger. A great screw seemed
to turn in his jaw, hardening it. There were clean, gleaming thoughts about what he should do next. They seemed without question, or consequence, as the trigger grew big against his finger.

But then his arm began to shake.

The harsh metal smell of the gun came up at him in waves. Suddenly, the trigger was so hot he had to let go. His brow was burning. Wet. He tried to wipe it clean.

‘I knew you was touched,’ growled Swanney. Webster was shaking. Blinking faster as his eyes began to sting with sweat. Swanney’s legs and arms seemed to be lengthening.
Unwinding. Reaching out for him. ‘I knew it!’

Webster took a step back. He guessed that Swanney was standing up, but he was blinking too quickly to see. And then he felt hands grabbing the opposite end of the shotgun.

Webster ripped the gun free. Tottered backwards. And the shock of it cleared his head.

Swanney was standing there in front of him, his bloody smile falling away as Webster levelled the gun at his chest.

A window opened along the street. Somebody shouted and cut the silence in half and, when Webster half looked, it set Swanney loose. He turned and ran, disappearing round the corner.

There was a squeal of brakes.

A dull thump.

The sound of an engine idling.

Webster edged around the corner. Swanney was lying face down on the pavement, his waist perfectly in line with the kerb, a dark puddle forming quickly around his head, or what was left of it,
the back of its sphere missing, like a rotten windfall apple scooped out to its core. The headlights of the car shone straight down the road.

The engine wobbled and died.

The driver’s door opened.

And somebody leant out and retched.

Webster retreated back around the corner and walked on quickly, the gun hidden beneath his greatcoat. His skin was hot, his lungs full of sparks. And gradually the night air slipped inside his
chest and cooled him.

As he wound a path back to the car, he stopped every now and then. But there was nobody following him. He was sure of it. Because there was nobody reflected in the shop windows or the wing
mirrors of cars as he passed them by. Yet he knew Billy had to be somewhere. Billy, who had found him, and locked him in the wagon cage like an animal.

And then Webster began to worry about the boy.

When he was close, he stopped in the adjoining street and listened carefully, but all he heard was the silence. He rounded the corner, the shotgun tight against his hip beneath
the greatcoat.

Street lamps dipped their necks like swans.

He saw houses, in a row, on either side. Set back from the street. With paths dissecting tiny gardens, which lead up to each front door.

James was not waiting by the car.

Webster walked on, straight past it, when he saw the slashed tyres slumped against the kerb like snowmelt. James’s duffel bag of clothes was sitting on the front seat, his black suit
draped on top. But Webster did not waver. He was light inside. Like a ghost. Or something made of paper. Somewhere in the dark a dog was barking and the sound of it chimed in the marrow of his
bones.

The crunch of his boots on the pavement became hypnotic. For a moment, it took him somewhere else. Back into the past. Into a desert shimmer. He heard shouting. Mortar fire. Gunshots. The
barking of dogs. He felt the sun and the dust on his face from a foreign land. He could smell sweat and boot polish and webbing and sun-kissed rock. The gun filled out forgotten parts of his hand
as he gripped it tighter and tighter.

He stopped, his breathing hard in his ears.

A growl was rolling towards him.

A large black dog tore out of the dark. Tongue trailing. Claws hissing on the pavement.

But Webster was not scared. He brought up the shotgun and fired once into the chest of the creature as it leapt for him.

It yelped. Landed across the tops of his boots. The warm weight of it lodged against his shins.

A bedroom light came on across the road, followed by others. Curtains twitched. Webster stepped over the dog and kept moving. The end of the street swallowed him up as people came out of their
houses and crowded round the dead black dog, stepping back from the blood as it pooled out over the pavement.

When Billy saw Webster raise the shotgun and shoot the dog dead, he knew that Swanney was not going to appear and help him.

As Webster kept walking towards the end of the street, Billy dragged James away, slipping down an alley where large steel bins were piled high with black plastic bags. At the far end, he
followed the cobbles round to the left and found himself on a narrow path that wound round between high-walled buildings and then opened up into a square ringed with cars. On three sides were tall,
smart houses, set back from the road, with large bay windows and black railings like lines of spears. On the one open side was the fringe of a green park lit by street lights.

Somewhere in the distance a police siren skewered the air. As it faded, a gunshot ripped through the car nearest to Billy and James, blowing out a window. Billy’s blood shuddered in the
wind of it. Something sharp caught the side of his face, and he put up a hand and felt a shard of glass lodged in his cheek like a tooth in the wrong place. His stomach turned and he looked
back.

Webster had dropped the shotgun and was running towards them. Billy drew James closer to him, putting the pistol to the boy’s head.

‘Stop!’ shouted Billy. But Webster kept on coming. Mouth open. Roaring. Tongue straining at its root. Billy raised the pistol and fired into the sky. But Webster did not falter.

Billy felt James shaking. He was shaking too. Flinging the boy to the ground, he turned and ran into the park, disappearing into the dark.

James was a heap in the road. His head had gone off like another gunshot on striking the tarmac. Glass tumbled from his hair as Webster picked him up in his arms and carried him away from the
square. He did not stop, keeping to the small paths and alleyways. Eventually, he found a towpath and followed the canal until he came to a bridge. He laid the boy down underneath the arch and then
took off his greatcoat and wrapped him in it.

James’s face was cut in places. Blood had dried in sticky patches. Webster ripped a corner from his shirt and used the water from the old plastic bottle in his greatcoat pocket to wipe the
boy’s face clean. After emptying the bottle, he stopped and stared at it, and squashed the sides together, and yelled and hurled it away down the path. Then he took out the small glass jar of
ointment from another pocket and ran his little finger round the inside until he had enough paste to smear across the cuts on James’s face.

After he had finished, Webster listened for some time to the distant buzz of a helicopter, and watched the spotlight strobe back and forth over the rooftops of the town.

Eventually, he lost interest and stared at the moon. He cursed at it under his breath until the anger in him had died down, leaving him cold and hollow inside.

After walking back down the path, he picked up the empty bottle and observed it for some time, turning it through his fingers, before screwing the top back on.

James stirred when Webster knelt beside him and put the bottle back in one of the pockets of the greatcoat. ‘Where are we?’ he said.

‘No place for a boy like you, that’s for sure,’ said Webster, staring at the black canal water. It could have been a river of blood for all he knew without some sort of light
to shine on it and see for sure.

The bus tucked back its doors like a pair of wings.

Webster stepped down on to the pavement and blinked in the sunlight. James appeared by his side. Just the two of them. A man in a dirty blue greatcoat and a boy in a black waterproof filched
from the back of a chair. They stood facing the warped reflection of themselves in the dark glass window of an office.

‘So,’ said Webster, ‘here we are.’

The bus shuddered and growled as it left. Cars zipped by.

‘If we go to the exact spot,’ said James, ‘you might remember something.’

Webster caught sight of a plane in the deep blue between two tall buildings. He watched it until it was gone and there was nothing left but a white trail fattening. He closed his eyes.

‘I wish we were somewhere else,’ he said.

They walked until the office blocks on either side of them faded away into a vast park and then they started over a large expanse of grass, which was hard and browned from the
sun. Bodies were marooned on towels and rugs. Lifeless-looking. As if their souls had abandoned them. In the mighty distance someone was steering a kite on the breeze.

They kept going for some time without saying anything, Webster plotting the way with James beside him. Eventually, they stopped in the shade of a line of lime trees by the top of a sheer bank
that fell away sharply into a long, steep slope. Old magazines, caught in a matting of weeds about halfway down, flapped like dying winged things. A Coke can had burrowed in deep. Great thickets of
brambles and hawthorn were fused together at the bottom.

‘It was here,’ said Webster. ‘I fell down this part of the bank.’ He pointed and opened his hand as though introducing James to an old friend. They stood in silence,
listening to the magazines catching the breeze. Looking into the brambles below.

‘Anything?’ asked James eventually. Webster stared for a while longer and then shook his head.

James studied the drop beneath them one last time and then looked along the edge of the bank in both directions.

Nothing but trees.

And grass.

And the path trailing off into the distance.

‘Doesn’t seem like much of a place to meet evil,’ he said.

Webster looked around them. And then he bent down and whispered in James’s ear.

‘The stuff gets everywhere,’ he said and then stiffened and straightened, folding his arms, as a crow landed on the grass and bounced towards them. Not a sound as it stopped and
stared up at them, head cocked, one black eye shining a half-moon in the sun. Webster raised his arms to shoo it away, but the crow seemed glued to the grass. So he ran at it, shouting and hissing,
and James watched it flap its wings and wheel into the sky. It was nothing more than a black dot by the time Webster had started walking away, leaving James to wonder why the man had done such a
thing.

After half an hour, they came upon a small kiosk selling cold drinks and ice cream. A fountain hissed in the middle of an ornamental pond and people were perched around the
stone rim, cooling off in the damp air.

Webster bought James an ice cream and a cup of tea in a styrofoam cup for himself, and they lay on the hard, baked ground, staring up at the sky, wondering what to do next.

‘You don’t remember anything at all?’ James asked finally.

‘No.’ Webster let out a long, slow breath. ‘Not from that night anyway.’ James noticed that Webster’s hands were trembling. His tea broke in tiny brown waves inside
the cup, which was sitting on top of his chest, rising and falling as he breathed.

‘You mean you keep remembering when you were a soldier?’

Webster stared at his hands until they were steady and then he took a sip of his tea.

‘Yeah.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘Sometimes things pop up out of the dark when I don’t expect it. Or if I think too much.’

James nodded because he understood exactly what Webster meant.

‘Do you want to talk about that instead?’ he asked. Webster said nothing. ‘We don’t have to if you don’t want to.’

‘I can’t say it really helps,’ said Webster.

‘We could pretend we’re asleep.’

Webster just smiled.

‘Not now.’

‘OK.’

And James stripped down to his tatty white T-shirt and balled up his waterproof and sweater behind his head, and lay down and closed his eyes.

When they walked on, they discovered an old man sitting on a bench, scattering nuggets of bread into a cloud of pigeons. James kept staring as they walked towards him because
the old man was only using his left hand to dig into the bag of bread and tear each white slice apart, while his right arm lay still on his lap. It made feeding the birds a laborious task. But he
stuck to it.

‘Lovely afternoon,’ said the man with a slight slur to his voice, and James noticed that the right-hand side of his face was drooping more than it should.

Webster just nodded and walked on, but James went over and sat down. There was something about the old man he recognized in himself, sitting there, all alone, as the world passed him by.

‘Sore feet,’ he said, pointing at his black school shoes as the pigeons moved in an oily shoal around them. The old man chuckled.