The Servants (3 page)

 

three

The next morning, Mark left the house early, skateboard under his arm as usual and a bolted breakfast of cornflakes taken alone in the silent kitchen. He was still feeling fuzzy from the dreams he’d had in the night, and wanted to get out into the cold winter sun. The house felt dark sometimes, even when all the lights were on.

He shouted upstairs to say he was going out. David appeared quickly at the top of the stairs, finger to his lips. His mother was asleep, evidently, and her keeper wanted Mark to be quiet.

He shrugged angrily—he was supposed to tell them where he was going, wasn’t he? David was forever saying so—but shut the big front door behind him quietly on the way out. The sky was wide and sharp blue again, though something about the quality of the light suggested there might be rain later. You could see that kind of thing more easily here than in a city. Better get his practice done early, then, rather than spend the morning walking up and down. He was getting a little bored with the seafront walk, if he was honest. When m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h they used to come here, they would go to the Lanes and look at the shops for at least some of the time. Even though few of them held things of any interest to him, he wanted to do that now. He was tired of this stretch of the promenade. He was tired of spending so much time alone.

He was just setting off down the slope toward the road when something caught his eye. He turned and saw that the door to the basement apartment was open. He went to the top of the metal staircase and peered down, curious. He couldn’t see much beyond the door, which was open about a foot and revealed a short, narrow passageway beyond. Then he heard a noise from within. It sounded like someone struggling with something.

“Hello?” he said.

There was no answer.

He went down the steps until he was in the basement courtyard. His head was only a couple of feet below the level of the sidewalk here, but it felt strange, as if he was descending into a whole other part of Brighton. He stood at the door and heard the noise again.

“Hello?” he repeated.

Still no response, and he was about to go back up the staircase when he heard the sound of shuffling feet. He took a hurried step back from the door, suddenly feeling like an intruder.

A woman appeared out of the gloom.

She was old, and short—about the same height as Mark—

and a little stooped. Her hair was pure white and her face was white too and looked as though it was made of paper that

 

t h e s e r va n t s

had been scrunched up in someone’s hand and then flattened out again. She was dressed all in black, not the black of new things but the color of a dress that had once been black but had been washed and folded and worn again, many times. The sleeves were fringed with lace. Her wrists were like sticks poking out of them, and the hands at the end were covered in little blotches, brown and purple against ivory skin. In one of these she was holding a lightbulb.

“Who are
you
?”

“Mark,” he said hurriedly. “I . . . I live upstairs.”

The old lady nodded once, and kept looking at him. He realized she was not so much old as
very
old, and also a little scarylooking. When she blinked, she looked like a bird, the kind you saw on the seafront, stealing bits of other people’s toast.

“I was walking past and I heard a sound, so . . . I wondered if someone needed help.”

“You must have good ears,” she said. Her voice was dry and a little cracked. “Do you have good ears? Do you
hear
things?”

“Well, yes, I suppose so,” Mark said.

The old lady held up the lightbulb. “Trying to change this. Can’t get the chair to stay steady. That’s all.”

“I could help, if you wanted?”

She smiled, and for a moment looked less intimidating and also younger. Certainly not a day over eighty-five. She turned and walked through the door, and Mark followed. The corridor was very narrow indeed, but after only a couple of feet there was another doorway. Mark realized that the first

 

m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h passageway was an addition, part of the courtyard that had been enclosed to provide somewhere to hang coats and store umbrellas. Beyond the inner doorway was a second corridor, which was much wider and evidently lay directly underneath the hallway of the house upstairs.

On the right side of this short corridor was a door, and Mark glanced through it as he stepped into the gloom. In a space about a third of the size of the room he was using upstairs, the old woman had crammed a single bed, two narrow armchairs, a small table, a bookcase, and a wardrobe. There was a tiny kitchen area under the bow-window. The furniture looked like the kind of stuff you saw outside secondhand shops, not protected from the weather and priced at about four pounds each. The light in the room was soft and dim, filtered through the lace curtains. The whole space couldn’t have been more than about twelve feet by eight, and most adults would have felt themselves wanting to stoop. He turned back to see that the old lady was standing by a rickety wooden chair in the passageway. A naked cable hung down from the ceiling. He took the bulb from the lady’s hand and carefully climbed up onto the chair.

He could feel the legs wobbling, but his practice on the promenade over the last couple of weeks made him feel slightly more confident of keeping the chair upright—certainly more than the woman’s hand gripping the back of the chair did, which he felt was unlikely to make much difference if the thing did decide to tip over.

He stretched up and unscrewed the bulb already in the fitting. It resisted, but finally came out with a rusty-sounding

 

t h e s e r va n t s

squeak. He handed it down to the old lady and pushed in the new one—and was startled when it suddenly glowed in his hand.

“Whoops,” the old lady said. “Sorry.”

He quickly screwed in the bulb before it got hot, then jumped down from the chair. He could see now that this corridor stopped after about six feet, where there was a heavy door, which didn’t look as if it had been opened in a long time. Mark was surprised. He’d assumed the old lady must have at least one more room in her apartment, maybe two—

she couldn’t possibly live just in that front space, could she?

The hallway seemed gloomy even though now it was lit. It was very dusty and there was an underlying smell, like the inside of something you were only supposed to know from the outside. There were no tiles on the floor, only battered floorboards, and the walls were dingy.

“That’s most kind,” the old lady said.

Mark shrugged, suddenly feeling a little embarrassed. When he got to the place on the promenade where the other kids normally were, Mark was confused at first. There was nobody there. As he stood in the middle of the open area, he eventually remembered it was a Monday morning. Everybody else was at school, probably—which is where Mark should have been, and would be, if they were still in London. The seafront was deserted, and even the little café, which had been open over the weekend, was shut, the white plastic tables and chairs put away.

Mark didn’t mind at first. At least he had the place to

 

m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h himself and wouldn’t have to worry that other boys—or girls: he’d seen a couple down here—might be laughing at him. After he’d been going up and down for an hour or so, however, he came to think maybe it didn’t work like that after all. Everything he did seemed a little more fluid than it had the day before. He still couldn’t flip the board on either axis, and every attempt ended in a hectic scrabble and the clattering sound of the board crash-landing several feet away—but on the other hand he didn’t wind up sliding along the ground as often, generally managing to land on his feet. So it was progress, kind of.

But it felt a little pointless.

The danger that other people might laugh at your mistakes was precisely what made it worthwhile—essential, even—to keep on trying. That was part of why boys were such a tough audience for each other: it made you
do
stuff. Without this you had to do everything for yourself, and that was okay for a while but then you started to wonder
why
you were doing it, and why you were still so crap at it. It made you question what the point of it all was, if it just meant you were going up and down, falling off, then going up and down again. Mark started looking up expectantly when people came past, in case someone was going to wander over to his area, put down a plank and a wedge, and start doing things. But nobody did. The only people walking up and down were old men with dogs, or couples not talking to each other. Soon there was hardly anyone at all, as the sky got more leaden and a cold wind picked up from the sea. The skateboard just didn’t want to stay upright or carry him. All it

 

t h e s e r va n t s

wanted was to tip him over, as painfully as possible, and then hurtle randomly away.

In the end it started to rain, and Mark walked badtemperedly back to the house, past the little hut that sold sandwiches and tea and cakes regardless of what day of the week it was, and whatever the weather. You couldn’t sit inside it, but there were plastic tables and chairs arranged on the promenade to one side, protected from the wind—slightly—

by sheets of yellow canvas. The café was called The Meeting Place, but today it was deserted except for a middle-aged man sitting alone at a table, looking down at his hands, an empty teacup beside him. He didn’t look as if he was expecting to meet anyone.

When he started to look up, Mark hurried past, in case the man’s face reminded him too much of his own. When he got indoors, David was in the kitchen, standing in front of the fridge, staring at the contents as if he couldn’t understand what he was seeing. Given that he had bought everything in there—very little of which was on Mark’s
favorite-things-to-eat
list—Mark thought that was annoying of him.

“How’s it going?” David asked, still gazing into the fridge.

Mark threw his jacket over a chair. “Pretty crap,” he said. David watched water drip off it onto the floor. “Going back out after lunch?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s
raining,
” Mark snapped. “And it’s a waste of

 

m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h time. You might have to put up with me being in your house for a while. Sorry if that’s going to put you out.”

“Of course it won’t,” David said. For once, his stepfather sounded irritated. “You can do whatever you want. It’s your house too.”

“No, it’s not,” Mark said, as if he’d been waiting for just this opportunity. “I don’t
live
here. I live in London.”

“Not anymore,” David said. “We—”

“
We
don’t do anything. What
I
do is nothing to do with you.”

“Actually, it is,” David sighed. “Your mother and I got married, Mark. Remember? You were there. That means what you do has
everything
to do with me. You may not like it, but that’s the way it is. We’re just going to have to work at it. It’s like skateboarding. You can’t just expect—”

“Oh fuck off,” Mark muttered.

David stared at him, still holding the door to the fridge, and the room suddenly felt very quiet.

“I’m going to have to ask you to apologize for that,” David said.

Mark had been as surprised as David to hear the words come out of his mouth, but he wasn’t going to take them back.

“No,” he said.

“Is everything all right down there?”

They both turned at the sound of Mark’s mother’s voice coming down the stairs. Mark opened his mouth to say no, of course it wasn’t, how could it be, but David got there first.

 

t h e s e r va n t s

He walked quickly over to stand in the doorway, tilted his head up.

“It’s fine,” he said. “I’ll be right up, honey.”

Mark understood then what his position had become. David now stood between him and his mother. He always would. This was his house. He ruled. Whatever he wanted to do, or say, he could. There was nothing Mark could do about that. Yet.

“Yeah,” he snarled quietly, “everything’s fine.”

He pushed past David and into the hallway, grabbing his jacket as he went past. He could hear it was still raining outside, but he didn’t care. He didn’t want to stay in the house. David said something to him in passing, but Mark didn’t listen, instead yanking the front door open and running outside, this time not caring how much noise the door made as it slammed behind him. He started quickly down the steps, but they were wet, and he was moving too fast.

On the second one down, he slipped, his foot sliding off

and jarring down onto the third. He tried to keep himself upright, but his other foot was soon slipping too, and the next thing he knew he was tumbling sideways to land flat on his face, sprawled across a puddle on the sidewalk. The wind was knocked out of him, all at once, and with it went his anger. It was replaced with something smaller and more painful. Something like misery. He had fallen down like this several times every day for weeks, but that had been different. That was just a matter of not being able to keep his balance on the board.

 

m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h This time it felt as if he’d been shoved.

“Oh dear,” said a voice.

Mark looked up to see that an old woman was standing a few feet away on the sidewalk.
The
old woman, in fact: the one from the basement apartment. She was bundled up in a black coat, woolly and thick, and was holding a little black umbrella.

She was looking down at him. “Horrible day,” she said. Then: “Are you hungry?”

 

four

While they waited for the old lady’s kettle to boil—it didn’t plug into the wall but sat on the stove—she opened the narrow door at the far end of her room. Beyond it lay a minuscule bathroom. The lady came back holding a towel. It was pale yellow and ragged around the edges but very soft, and Mark used it to dry his hands and face. Then he sat in one of the two chairs and looked around the room as the woman made two cups of tea. He felt odd being in here, but when he’d been lying there on the sidewalk at the old lady’s feet with the rain coming down, he hadn’t known what else to do. He couldn’t go back inside the house, because she’d seen him storming
out,
and also because he just didn’t want to. He couldn’t go down to the seafront—he’d get soaked.