The Death House (14 page)

Seventeen

‘Sorry I fell asleep,’ Clara whispers as we go in for the breakfast. ‘I couldn’t help it.’

‘It’s okay, I did, too.’ I try to be normal but everything looks different today: bright and sharp. Hyperreal. I don’t want to tell anyone about the nurse, especially not Clara. The nurse leads to the retest and I can’t talk about that, either. I love Clara but I’m now keeping two secrets from her. I wonder if she keeps secrets from me. I wonder if we all have secrets we never share.

There’s no sign of Matron and the two nurses at the food station keep their expressions neutral even though Matron must have told them what’s happened. I get a plate of eggs and bacon I don’t want and go back to the table. Luckily, everyone else from our dorm looks vague, too.

‘My head hurts.’ Will is pale and his eyes are dull. ‘And I ache everywhere.’

Tom snorts out a giggle. ‘Hangover,’ he says.

‘Well, if this is how drinking makes people feel, I don’t get why they do it.’

Louis doesn’t say anything but his eyes dart nervously my way. I don’t look at him. I don’t have time for his paranoia. Will has a hangover, but Matron murdered our nurse in the night. The sentence is on a loop in my head but still it feels surreal. Nothing is certain any more. It feels like the solid walls of the house are closing in and suffocating me.

‘The snow’s still there,’ Will says. ‘We can finish our snowman. Can we, Louis?’

Louis nods.

‘Have any of you been in the church?’ Ashley stands over us and the words come out in a tumble like a held-in breath. We all look at each other. Ashley still sleeps in our dorm but we don’t ever speak any more.

‘Why?’ Tom again. He’s doing the talking today. Probably a good thing. Once me and Clara are gone he’ll have to be the boss of Dorm 4.

‘Have you?’ Ashley repeats.

‘No,’ I say. ‘Why the fuck would we want to go in your stupid church?’ I can see each poster clearly in my head but now my imagination has put another on the wall, one with no name and just
She was kind so Matron killed her
written on it.

‘Some stuff has been tampered with.’ He’s defensive but also awkward. He’s like a middle-aged man. Who says ‘tampered with’, anyway? It’s like something Matron would say.
A cupboard in the playroom has been tampered with.
Matron fills my head.

‘It wasn’t us,’ Louis says. ‘We haven’t been in there.’

I can feel Clara’s eyes on me. It’s the candles. He knows someone’s been using them. We need to be more careful. Everywhere I look I feel trapped. I need to get into Matron’s office soon and find out when the boat’s coming but at the same time I’m terrified of actually doing it. Maybe there’s an alarm. Maybe she sleeps in there. I imagine opening the door and finding her sitting behind her desk, waiting in the gloom, perfectly still, with a large syringe in her hand. I think if she smiles at me I’ll see a row of ragged sharp teeth and then she’ll yawn wide and I’ll be sucked into the endless darkness.

‘Let’s go outside,’ Clara says, breaking the spell of my imagination so suddenly I almost jump. ‘I feel really good today.’

‘I want this headache to go away,’ Will says, chewing listlessly on a piece of toast.

In the garden, I face away from the house and the top-floor windows that feel like eyes staring down at me. Clara wants to climb the tree and I go with her. The exertion is good and despite everything, despite all the madness of the night before, I laugh with her as I clumsily swing my legs up and get tangled in twigs. The snow is still magical and the sky is clear blue overhead, the air crisp and cold all the way to the moon. We knock inches of snow from the branches as we climb with numb fingers and tingling skin, and finally we come to rest on thick wood, separate seats on either side of the trunk.

I’m out of breath and hot and Clara’s face shines as she peers round at me. Her branch is a little in front of mine and I’m in awe as she tilts her head back in the bright wintry sunshine. I’m clinging on for dear life. It didn’t look so high when we started but now I’m almost afraid even to glance down, sure that I’ll fall if I do.

‘Isn’t it lovely?’

I look out over the horizon. ‘I can see the mainland,’ I say. Through the distant haze I glimpse brown against the blue. ‘Just.’

‘Not long till we’ll be there.’ She smiles. ‘The boat has to come back soon.’

We sit in silence as beneath us the others play.

‘Don’t you worry about leaving them behind?’ I say, eventually. ‘Harriet and Eleanor?’

‘A little.’ Her smile fades. ‘But staying here won’t change anything.’

She’s right, of course. And people are tougher than I think. Everyone is caught up in their own dread – their own longing to survive.

‘Maybe we’ll give them hope,’ she says. ‘We’ll be like legends. The two who got away. Even the kids who come after will hear about us.’

‘We could change things when we get out. Help the others.’

‘Part of us will always be here,’ she says, snapping off a sharp, thick twig from above. ‘Right here in this tree. Look.’

I twist round to see, gripping the trunk tight, and my stomach lurches slightly as my eyes drop down for a second to the white ground so far below. Clara laughs.

‘You scared you’re going to fall?’

‘Maybe a bit.’ I grin. My fear is obvious in my tense body, but this is a good fear, one built from adrenaline and excitement. A normal fear rather than dread.

‘See, I told you the future isn’t certain. You’re not going to die from Defectiveness, or from drinking too much on a hot beach somewhere. You’re probably going to fall out of this tree trying to get down and break your neck.’ She’s scratching at the trunk with her twig.

‘That’s very reassuring. Thanks.’

‘But you’ll be immortalised . . .’ She pauses to scratch harder. ‘Right here.’

I crane to see what she’s doing, which is difficult because I don’t want to relinquish my grip on the trunk and my neck aches with the strain. But when I see it I smile. An off-kilter heart roughly carved into the skin of the tree and inside it

T&C

4EVA

‘Trees live for hundreds of years,’ she says softly. ‘Other kids who climb up here will see this and remember that two escaped. And then one day, maybe in a hundred years’ time, this will just be an ordinary house again, and normal kids will climb up and wonder who T and C were. Isn’t that a crazy thought?’

I try and imagine a hundred years from now. Everyone alive now will be gone. It will be all new people rushing around and thinking they’re important. My head spins a bit. Even here, in the Death House, after what I saw last night, I still can’t imagine the world going on without me in it. I envy the tree.

After lunch Clara pulls me upstairs. ‘I want to go to bed,’ she says, and for a minute I think she’s tired, but then she closes the dorm door and puts a chair under the handle and I realise what she means. After the events of the past night, the fact that we’ve had sex has become like a dream, something from a world before, but as I stand there, my legs suddenly shaking, the wonder of it comes flooding back to me and I know I need it, I need
her
, to wipe all this shit out of my head for just a little while.

We’re more confident now and we take more time. We do it twice and the second time I don’t even have that edge of terror that I’m doing it all wrong. It’s not like in the films I’ve seen or the stuff I watched on the computer. We’re clumsier. We don’t speak. We don’t do some of those things they do, but at the same time it’s more amazing than any of that. It’s like a whole new world for us to explore. Her skin is hotter than I remember. She’s a whole universe that I don’t quite understand and I can’t look at her naked body enough and the small sighs she makes and the way she moves make me want to explode. It’s like all the talking we could ever do. It’s like really knowing each other entirely. It’s love. That’s what it is.

We’re lying on her bed afterwards, our clothes pulled back on, just in case, when there’s a knock at the door.

‘Toby? You in there?’ The handle rattles and gets stuck on the chair wedged under it. ‘Toby? Toby? Please come out.’

It’s Louis and he sounds upset.

‘Hang on.’ We tidy up our clothes and Clara hurriedly pulls the sheets and blankets straight as I go to the door.

‘What is it?’

Louis doesn’t even glance at the messy bed or notice Clara’s hair is half-out of her ponytail. His bottom lip wobbles and he’s shuffling, anxious.

‘It’s Will. Something’s wrong. You have to come.’

Clara is beside me and we look at each other, the magic of moments ago vanished, eaten up by dread. We go without saying a word.

Will is in the bathroom, sitting on the rim of the white tub. His eyes are red and although he’s not crying, he has been and is still on the edge of it. He sniffs, loud and thick, and looks up at us.

I can see the problem straight away. The front of his jeans are wet, dark stains running down the legs. He’s pissed himself.

‘We came inside because he couldn’t pick the snow up properly,’ Louis says. ‘And then this happened.’

‘I couldn’t feel it,’ Will whines, a small, worried puppy-sound. ‘I couldn’t feel the snow and then I couldn’t feel this happening. Not till my legs got wet.’ The tears are coming again. He looks up at me. ‘I’m scared, Toby.’

Clara sits on the cool ceramic and puts her arm around him, hushing him gently, and we let him cry himself out.

‘What are we going to do, Toby?’ Louis whispers. ‘We can’t let the nurses know.’

My head is burning with fire ants as I take it in. I was sure it would be me or Louis next. We had the retest. Whatever is happening to Will, we have to protect him for as long as possible. ‘We’ll rinse them out and put them on a radiator. Say they got soaked in the snow. But we have to get him into some other trousers and then go back outside and try to play. Make it look good. Normal. Just in case someone saw something. Even if only for half an hour or so, then come in and play chess or something.’

Louis nods. ‘He’s going to be okay, though?’

‘Sure,’ I say, loud enough for Will to hear. ‘It’s just the snow. He’s not used to it. Maybe he’s allergic to it.’

‘Yeah, that must be it.’ Louis looks relieved but there are still dark shadows behind his eyes. It must be tough having a brain that big. You can’t ever ignore the logic of something, however hard you try.

‘Do you think that’s it?’ Will says. He’s younger. Sweeter. His face is suddenly full of hope. ‘Can people be allergic to snow?’

‘Don’t see why not,’ Clara says. ‘Or perhaps it’s the wine. Now come on, stand up. Let’s get you out of these.’

She smiles gently at him and he does as he’s told. He’s ten going on five this afternoon and Clara’s the closest thing he has to a mum. I hope he doesn’t ask after the nice nurse. I don’t think I can lie that well.

It’s only when we peel his jeans away that we see the streaks of pink in the piss that’s run down his legs. Will starts to cry again then, and I sponge his legs and tell him it’s nothing while Clara washes his jeans out in the tub and Louis runs to get fresh trousers. Will’s facing away and doesn’t see the red that comes out of them, but Clara’s expression is troubled and Louis is trembling and all around us the house looms large once again.

‘It’ll be all right,’ Clara tells Will once he’s dressed again. ‘Don’t worry.’

‘I don’t want the nurses to take me. Do you think they watch us
change
before they kill us? Do you think the changing hurts?’ His voice is hollow, and he swallows between the words. I don’t know if it’s the result of his fear or his active Defectiveness. ‘I don’t want my eyes to bleed. I want my mum.’

‘It happened to me once,’ Louis suddenly says, loud and defiant. ‘That blood-in-the-wee thing. It was just an infection.’

He’s lying, I know he is, but he’s determined to convince himself.

‘Now come on, stop being a baby and let’s go and finish our snowman.’ He grabs Will’s hand and drags him off, talking constantly as they head downstairs. I don’t know who I feel most sorry for out of the two of them – the one who’s going or the one who’s being left behind. I feel sick. It’s too much to think about after last night. I don’t want to be awake when they take Will.

After a moment, Clara bursts into tears and, as we stand hugging in the bathroom, squeezing each other tight, so do I.

Tom notices at teatime. Will’s struggling with his cutlery, gripping his fork ham-fisted in order to scoop some food into his mouth. Not that any of us is eating much.

‘What the fuck’s up?’ he says. ‘You sick?’ We glare at him.

‘It’s nothing,’ Clara says. ‘He’ll be fine.’

Tom looks at me and I can see he’s pretty sure Will won’t be fine and finds confirmation of that in my face. Eleanor’s eyes dart around the table trying to find some truth between the kids and the ‘grown-ups’. None of us can wait for tea to finish. Louis talks all the way through it, chattering about the snowman and asking Eleanor questions about the Narnia book that Jake destroyed until she says she’ll tell them the rest of the story later. My jaw aches with the tension and I’ve got a headache from crying. I want it to be night. I want to climb over that wall and run and run and run until I collapse.

Worst of all is that I can see the glances coming from the other tables. We’ve learned to be like sharks scenting blood. The Dorm 4 table is now a curiosity. It’s like we’re all tainted. Will’s clumsiness and weepiness have been noted and now the grotesque show has begun. How long will it take? When will the nurses notice?
Thank fuck it’s him not me.
This is how Jake must have felt when Ellory got sick, but we’re different in Dorm 4. We won’t abandon our own. We’re better than that and Will is still one of us.

At bedtime Ashley asks Will if he wants to come to the church the next day and this makes Will cry all over again, his thin shoulders slumped in his pyjamas, hitching as he sobs.

‘Shut the fuck up,’ Tom snarls. ‘He’s fine.’

‘I’m not talking about his health,’ Ashley says. ‘But he’s upset and afraid. The church might help, that’s all I’m saying. It might help calm him down.’