The Servants (2 page)

As you looked along the front to the right, the buildings changed. They became smaller, more varied, and after a while there were some that looked completely different and not old at all. A few tall buildings made of concrete, two big old hotels (one red, one white), then eventually the cinema, which looked as if it had been built in the dark by someone who didn’t like buildings very much. Or so David said, and as a result Mark found he rather liked its featureless, rectan 

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gular bulk. You could see movies in there, of course, though Mark hadn’t. He was only allowed to go along the front in the area bounded by the yellow buildings. He was only permitted down here by himself at
all
because he’d flat-out refused to stay in the house the whole day, and after enduring a long lecture about talking to strangers. Mark had just stared at David during this, hoping the man would get the point—that he was a stranger too, so far as Mark was concerned. He hadn’t. It was getting very cold now, but still Mark didn’t start the walk up to the promenade. He stayed a little longer on the border between the sea and the land, wishing he wasn’t there at all. He’d liked Brighton in the past. When he’d come with his mother and dad, they’d stayed at a modern hotel down past the cinema. His mother spent hours poking around the Lanes, the
really
old area where the streets were narrow and twisted and most of the stores sold jewelry. They had spent long afternoons on the pier—the big, newer one, with all the rides, not the ruined West Pier, which was closer to Brunswick Square and which someone had, a few years before, set on fire. More than once. But now they were staying in David’s house, and all Mark could see was the way the town came down to the sea, and then stopped.

London didn’t stop. London went on more or less forever. That was a good thing for towns to do. It was a good thing for
everything
to do, except visits to museums, or toothaches, or colds. Why should things go on for a little while and then stop? How could stopping be a good thing? Brighton ran out. It was interesting and fun for a while and then you hit the beach and it was pebbles and then it stopped and became the

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m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h sea. The sea was different. The sea wasn’t about you and what you wanted. The sea wasn’t concerned with anything except itself, and it didn’t care about anyone.

Mark watched as the starlings began to fly along the front, heading for the West Pier, and then finally started for home.

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two

By the time Mark had walked over the pedestrian crossing and up the sidewalk around the square, it was almost completely dark. It looked nice that way, he had to admit, lights coming on in the other houses.

When he got to David’s house, he noticed another light there, too.

The building they were living in was tall like the others, three big stories above street level with a further lower one at the very top. To the right of the wide steps leading up to the front door there was a little curving staircase that headed downward. It was made of metal that had been painted black more than once but was now leaking rust. Losing a long battle against the salty air, like everything else on the seafront.

At the bottom of this staircase was a tiny basement courtyard, about four feet deep by eight feet wide, and under the steps to the main house was another door. There was a window in the front of this section, a smaller version of the big, bow-fronted windows above. It was covered with lace m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h curtains, which meant you couldn’t see inside. Apparently, someone else lived there, an old woman.

David, who liked to explain everything—like the fact his accent sounded weird at times because he’d spent a long time living in America—had explained that although he owned the whole house, the basement was a self-contained apartment that he hadn’t even been inside. The woman who lived there had been there for years and years and years, and so he’d agreed to let her stay. Mark had never seen any actual evidence that anyone lived there, and had half-wondered if the whole story had been a lie to keep him out of that part of the house.

But tonight there was a glow behind the curtains, dim and yellow, as if from a single lamp with a weak bulb. He let himself into the main house with his keys. The hallway felt cold and bare. David had the whole place painted white inside before they moved down from London. He had never lived here himself, having bought it only six months ago with all the money he’d made while he was away doing whatever boring thing he’d been doing in America.

Mark shut the door very quietly behind him; but not quietly enough.

“Mark? Is that you?”

His stepfather’s voice sounded flat and hard as it echoed down the wide staircase from the floor above. Mark put his skateboard in the room that was serving as his bedroom, on the right-hand side of the corridor, and slowly started up the stairs.

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t h e s e r va n t s

“Yeah,” he said.

Who else was it going to be?

His mother’s bedroom was on the second floor, the highest level currently in use. The top two floors were closed up and used for storage, the rooms uncarpeted and bare, with heating that didn’t work. Mark got the idea that David didn’t have enough money left to do anything about them right now. His mother was in the front room when he walked in.

“Hello, honey,” she said. “How was your day?”

She was on the couch, which had been put in the middle of the front room on this floor, the one with the wide bay window looking over the square. There was a thick blanket over her. The television in the corner was on, but the sound was turned off.

Originally, the idea had been that this would be Mark’s room, but soon after they’d got down here, it had become obvious his mother wasn’t finding the stairs easy. She needed somewhere on this level to spend time, because it drove her nuts to be stuck in the bedroom all day, and so Mark had wound up in the room underneath, which was supposed to be a sitting room. He didn’t mind, because his mother needed it to be this way, but it still felt as if he was camping out. Mark kissed her on the cheek, trying to remember how many days it had been since she had left the house. This room looked nice, at least. There were four or five lamps, all casting a glow, and the only pictures in the house were on its walls. She smiled up at him. “Any luck?”

“A little,” he said, but, having been trained by her to be

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m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h honest, he upturned his palms to reveal the grazes. “Not a lot.”

She winced. Mark noticed that the lines around her eyes, which hadn’t even
been
there six months ago, looked a little deeper, and that there were a couple more gray hairs among the deep, rich brown.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll get there.”

“Sure you will,” said a voice.

David came out of his mother’s bedroom, looking the way he always did. He was slim and a little over medium height, and he wore a pair of neatly pressed chinos and a denim shirt, as usual. His nose was straight. His hair was floppy but somehow neat. He looked—according to a friend Mark had back in London, whose uncle worked in the stock exchange and so had experience of these matters—like someone for whom every day was casual Friday. He did not look at
all
like Mark’s real father, who had short hair and was strongly built and wore jeans and T-shirts all the time and in general looked like someone you didn’t want to get in a fight with. David was drying his hands on a small towel. Mark found this annoying.

“Let’s see,” he said, cocking his head at Mark.

“Just a graze,” Mark muttered, not showing him. “What are we eating? Can we order from Wo Fat?”

The question had been directed solely at his mother, but David squatted down to talk to him. This made him a good deal shorter than Mark, which seemed an odd thing to do. Mark wasn’t a little child.

“Your mother’s not feeling too hungry,” David said, with the voice he used for saying things like that, and just about

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everything else. “I went to the supermarket earlier. There’s cool stuff in the fridge. Maybe you could forage yourself something from there?”

“But . . .” Mark said. What he wanted to say was that he’d done that the previous evening, and the night before, not to mention both lunchtimes. Also that frequently ordering food in from Wo Fat, a Chinese restaurant up on Western Road, was
traditional
when they stayed down in Brighton—though this was a ritual that involved Mark’s real father, not David. Mark caught sight of his mother, however, and didn’t say either of these things. She smiled at him again, and shrugged.

“Sorry,” she said. “Tomorrow, maybe, okay?”

Mark nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He was furious at David for putting his mother in this position, for making her be the one who apologized, when Mark
knew
it was David who didn’t really approve of takeout and who felt she should only be eating very healthy things. Who just didn’t . . .
get it
.

Didn’t get anything. Shouldn’t be here.

“Right—maybe tomorrow,” David said unconvincingly.

“Who knows—perhaps we’ll even go out to eat.”

Mark sat on the couch and talked with his mother for a while, and then they watched some television together. She moved the blanket so it lay over the two of them, and it was nice, even though David was hovering in the background doing whatever it was he always did.

“You must be getting hungry, aren’t you?” his stepfather said, after half an hour.

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m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h Mark turned to stare at him. His mother was looking tired, and Mark knew what was being implied. But it wasn’t David’s place to say it, and Mark wanted him to realize that. David just looked back with eyes that were equally unblinking. Mark muttered good-night and took himself downstairs, where he made a ham sandwich in the kitchen, added a couple of cookies, and took the plate into “his” room, along with the last available Diet Coke.

There was no carpet on the floor of his room and nothing on the walls, and it was not terribly warm. The sash window did not fit snugly and rattled a little sometimes in the night. He sat with a blanket around his shoulders and watched his little television for a couple of hours, but soon he felt tired from another long afternoon of falling off his skateboard, and went to bed.

When he dreamed, it was of being back in the house in London. Though that house had been a lot smaller than the one in Brighton, it had been a real home. The place where he’d been born, grown up, had friends to visit, waited for Santa Claus to come every year—even after his father had explained that there was no such thing.

Mark dreamed he was in the back garden there, kicking a ball around with his dad. They ran around together, knocking it back and forth, faster and faster. Mark was better at it than he’d ever been before, always managing to return his dad’s searching passes, earning grins and laughs and shouts of approval for each time he sent it singing back. They both started panting, getting out of breath but keeping at it, know 

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ing there was some kind of force acting through them now, something outside their control, that they had to keep playing while it lasted, no matter how tired they got. Then Mark’s father kicked the ball in a completely different direction. They hadn’t been making it easy for each other before, but at least he’d been kicking it somewhere Mark had a chance of getting to. This last kick wasn’t a pass he was
ever
going to be able to intercept. The ball went sailing clean over the fence on a trajectory that was low and flat and weirdly slow. It flew silently, disappearing into a twilight that arrived suddenly and yet then felt as if it had been there forever. Mark turned his head to watch it go, wondering if he was ever going to be able to get the ball back. He watched also because it meant he did not have to look back at his father’s face, in case he saw there that this kick had not been an accident, that his dad had deliberately kicked it over the fence. Mark kept waiting for the sound of a crash, of the ball hitting a window—or at least the ground—but it never came. When he eventually did turn back, he realized his father had gone, could never have really been there, in fact. Mark was no longer in the garden back at the old house, but on the promenade down by Brighton seafront, next to one of the super-benches that had old metalwork walls and a roof and places where you could sit on all sides. It was dark, and he was alone, and there was nothing to see or hear except the sound of the sea. Then Mark realized he was lying rather than standing, and that he was not nearly cold enough to be down by the sea in the middle of the night: that the sound he’d interpreted as

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m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h the sea was in fact the rumble of distant traffic on the road, heard through a window. He came to understand that in reality he was in his bed in David’s house. The room was very dark but for a thin strip of pale light that seeped through a gap in the curtains from a streetlight outside in the square. Though it wasn’t as cold as the beach would have been, it was still far from warm, and he huddled deep into his bedclothes, lying on his side, facing out into the room. As he started to drift toward sleep again, he thought he could hear a different noise. At first it sounded like a soft and distant flapping, but then he realized it was people talking somewhere. At least two voices, maybe more. He wondered if it was his mother and David, upstairs, though it must be very late by now, past the middle of the night. His mother needed a lot of sleep at the moment. If she was awake at this time, it was not a good thing.

He opened his eyes a little.

And saw something pass in front of his face. It was there for barely a second, something that looked like the back of someone’s hand, moving past the side of the bed within a couple of feet of his head. A sound that was like the swish of fabric.

Then he heard footsteps, and though they must have been from upstairs, they did not sound like it. They sounded more as if they had traveled across the floor of
his
room, from just beside his bed to the doorway, and then disappeared into the corridor and away toward the back of the house. Then everything was silent, and still.