Thirteen Days of Midnight (4 page)

I walk into the kitchen, and my good mood vanishes like there’s a bucket of fear balanced above the door. The kitchen is empty. The sun is starting to highlight the storm clouds nearest the horizon. Everything is perfectly still.

The reason I’m so unnerved is there’s a full English breakfast sitting on the kitchen table at my spot. There shouldn’t be a full English breakfast sitting on the table. There shouldn’t be a full English breakfast anywhere in this house, because I’ve only just woken up, and Ham, to my knowledge, is unable to operate the stove or can opener. Mum’ll barely stand up today, and besides, she won’t ever cook meat for me, so there’s no way she’s responsible. I move tentatively over to the breakfast, like it’s attached to the trip wire of a bomb. I examine the eggs, the bacon, the mug of tea. There’s even a side plate of toast, a napkin folded into a triangle, a small glass of orange juice.

Hypothesis: I’ve started sleep-cooking.

I walk past the impossible breakfast and try to locate Ham, who is the other piece of this puzzle. Why hasn’t he eaten the breakfast? Unless food is carefully guarded, Ham will devour it, with extreme prejudice. He’s been downstairs more than half an hour now.

I find him in his crate in the laundry room. He rolls his eyes at me when I walk in but won’t get up to greet me. He’s shivering with cold.

“Ham?”

He still won’t move. I run upstairs and get my meat skewer again. I do a swift check of the upstairs and downstairs rooms, but nothing is out of place or missing. I don’t understand. Who would break into my house and lay out a cooked breakfast for me? Some sort of consentless butler service?

Hypothesis: There is no breakfast. I’m going nuts.

I stride back into the kitchen. It’s still there, steaming away, tea the exact shade of brown that I like.

I want to call someone, but I’m unsure what to say. Can I report an unauthorized breakfast? I take my phone out of my pocket. I’m not going to be a victim even if I’m not sure what I’m a victim of. I dial nine three times and then stand there with my finger on the call button. I imagine various conversations with the police, none of them especially productive. Maybe I could just say someone broke into my house? But then they’re going to ask what they took and I’ll have to explain what happened, and then they’re going to laugh at me.

The mystery meal is starting to cool. I don’t know what to do. I walk upstairs and push the door to Mum’s room open. She’s still asleep, lying twisted up inside her duvet. I lean down and take hold of her pale wrist.

“Did you make breakfast for me today? Hello?”

She opens her eyes but doesn’t move her head.

“Luke,” she says, “it’s not such a good time for me today . . .”

“Mum, I know, but —”

“It’s very difficult to listen to you talking, love,” she says, putting her hands over her face.

“Seriously,” I begin.

“If you could get me some water,” she says, and closes her eyes again.

That’s all I’m going to get. I shut my mouth.

She’s supposed to help me, not the other way around.

In the end I decide not to call the police. Like, what are they going to do? They’ll ask some questions, and my name gets put on a computer somewhere, and they save the file and mark it
LUNATIC
and forget about me.

Instead I scrape the breakfast into the bin, and then put all the dishes in the dishwasher on extra hot in case the food genuinely was laced with cyanide. I eat some more cold turkey from the fridge and wash it down with mango juice straight from the carton. After I’ve done this, there is a brief moment of panic when I think that maybe the invader has poisoned everything in the fridge as well, but I don’t get stomach cramps, so I’m probably all right. I head upstairs and bring Mum water. I get my bag, and then I’m out the door into the gray morning.

Forty years since they built it, Dunbarrow High School is crumbling like an ancient slab of shortbread. The once-zestful green doors have faded to a sickly pea color. There are five times the number of students the school was originally built for, and it’s staffed by the obligatory crew of dictators and divorcées.

My friends are in the schoolyard, like every morning, hoofing a ball around. The center of the yard is dominated by the upper classman, and the maggots that populate the lower years have to play their games at the edge, near the trash cans. Kirk Danknott deftly flips the ball off one toe and it arcs through the air, landing just at Mark Ellsmith’s feet. Mark subdues the ball under his heel and sends it skidding over to me.

“Manchett,” says Mark.

“All right, lads,” I say.

Kirk grunts.

Mark is tall and broad, with eyes the color of a swimming pool. He’s the rugby team captain, which means I have to laugh at his jokes.

I flick the ball over to Kirk.

“You see the match?” he asks.

“Nah, I was busy. Saw the highlights last night.”

Kirk and me have been playing soccer together since we were eight years old. Kirk’s heavyset, with hair shorn to a dusting of fuzz on his skull. He’s wearing dirty orange sneakers with the laces trailing.

“Where were you yesterday?” Mark asks.

“I had family stuff,” I say, knowing this will shut down any further questions on the subject. The less Mark and Kirk and the rest of the guys know about the situation with Mum and my dad, the better, has always been my strategy. One thing about Dad being so separate from us is no one ever suspects that I’m related to the guy on TV with a bunch of rings and a white suit. He doesn’t even look like me, thanks to the weight he carries — and that’s fine by me. To survive Dunbarrow High you want to be as normal as possible, and that means no ill Mum, no ghost-hunter Dad, just ordinary Luke Manchett who likes soccer and rugby and doesn’t like schoolwork.

Mark nods at my excuse and turns away.

“Here, you’re coming to the park tonight?” Kirk asks. Tuesday’s the only time none of us have any kind of practice, so it’s normally a night to hang out.

I think about the solicitors, and my dad’s will, and Mum lying in her bed like she’s drowned. I think about strangers preparing a traditional breakfast in my kitchen and somehow leaving before I wake up.

“I dunno, man,” I say.

“Are you joking? I’ve barely seen you. Besides, Holiday’s definitely going.”

Holiday Simmon is the most eligible girl in our year, bar none. She has honey-blond hair and the kind of face and body you normally have to buy a magazine to look at. She recently came back on the market after breaking up with her boyfriend, who was purportedly at college in Brackford. Since then I’ve seen her several times at our rugby games, standing at the edge of the field in various flawless outfits. Kirk immediately noticed that I had noticed and hasn’t let up about it.

“So what?” I say to Kirk, keeping watch on Mark’s face. He betrays no interest.

“I just don’t want you missing out, mate.”

“I’ve got . . . homework,” I say, instantly regretting my terrible excuse. Mark and Kirk give me identical grimaces of contempt, as if to say,
Who are you, and what did you do with Luke?

“You sure you’re all right?” Mark asks. “The Head didn’t actually get you with all that stuff about the ‘most important year of our lives,’ did she?”

“School’s a joke,” Kirk adds. “They don’t teach you anything you need to know to get a real job. When are we ever gonna use any of this stuff once we leave?”

“Kirk,” I say, trying to take the heat off, “is it true Mr. Richmont drew a vomiting face on your last history essay?”

“Look,” he says, “I can make a thousand quid a week selling broadband door-to-door, all right? They do it on commission. I’m a natural sales personality. You don’t need to go to uni to get a job. Pass the ball.”

I skim the ball over to Kirk. He intercepts the pass and then in one smooth motion draws his leg back and sends the ball cannoning across the yard, toward the glass-fronted school office. The ball hits Elza Moss, Public Weirdo Number One, in the back with a thud I almost feel. She whirls around, hair flaring out.

Elza Moss is the kind of girl who would’ve been burned at the stake a few hundred years ago. I know it sounds cruel, but it’s true. You only have to look at her to see she doesn’t fit: tall and pale, with a dusting of freckles under her eyes. She’s got a redhead’s complexion but dyes her hair midnight-black, the contrast making her face white as a waxwork. Her hair is sprayed and back-combed until it towers over her, enormous, like a captive storm cloud.

I don’t exactly hate Elza, but there are very strict rules at Dunbarrow High School, among the students at least. Girls are supposed to have neat, glossy hair, not foot-high thunderheads. Jewelry may be worn, but not too much. Your clothes can’t be bought from charity shops or handed down by relatives or discovered in the attic of some stately home somewhere, which are the vibes I get from Elza’s non-uniform wardrobe. Girls are permitted — encouraged — to have eye makeup, but trying to look like Cleopatra is not part of the brief.

She could get a pass if she made any effort to fit in, but she refuses to meet even the loosest of guidelines. She wears army boots to school and reads too many books and uses too many words and smokes cigarettes outside the gates on her own. I would bet money that her room contains a bale of poetry and that none of it rhymes.

“He shoots, he scores,” announces Kirk. All the lower years are sniggering, but I’m not laughing, since Elza’s known to have something of a sharp tongue on her. Just as she’s about to start yelling, she makes eye contact with me, and her face changes. She turns calm and almost curious-looking, searching me with her gaze. This is all I need, on top of everything else, some outcast developing a psycho-crush on me. I scowl at her, and she shrugs before nudging our ball into the thick October mud that passes for a flower bed and pressing the full weight of her boot on it, pushing it down until it’s almost completely submerged. She raises an eyebrow at me and walks away.

“Aw, whatever,” says Mark.

“Kirk, you’re getting that out, mate.”

“What a freak.”

The morning is so overcast that every classroom has the lights on. I’m sitting in math, slouched forward on my desk, watching as the teacher draws rows of numbers on the whiteboard. I’m normally all right at this, but I can’t follow any of it today. Every column of figures makes me think of my inheritance, the four million, Mr. Berkley. Not to mention that there’s something about last night that I can’t seem to get my head around. I know that I left Dad’s book on the sofa, downstairs. I went upstairs with Ham, burst into Mum’s room, and then went to sleep. The book was on my bedside table this morning. Normally I’d just assume that I brought the book upstairs myself and forgot about it, but the appearance of the mystery breakfast this morning suggests that someone is moving things around in my house.

I shudder. It seems such a bizarre thing for a stranger to break in and do, that I’m tempted to think either Mum or me has started sleepwalking. You hear about people doing all kinds of mad stuff while they’re asleep. Some of them even commit murders.

I try to refocus my attention on the morning’s algebra problems, but thoughts keep blaring: the money, the mystery breakfast — and from there I start thinking about Dad.

I don’t know much about his early life. He met Mum at a psychic fair back in the days when she lived in a van and never wore shoes. Dad’s mother died when he was really young, and his dad, Grandpa Archie, started drinking a lot. Grandpa died about a year after I was born, so I don’t remember him at all. Dad worked as a builder from when he was pretty young before deciding he’d become a psychic and exorcist for reasons Mum’s never really explained. He got a TV show, which became pretty successful for a show like that, married Mum, had me, and then left us when I was six.

If Dad had never been around at all, it’d all be a lot easier to stomach. Just me and Mum, doing our thing. But my memories of him are good ones. I really liked him. We lived in the Midlands back then, only moved way up north to Dunbarrow after the separation, and our house was nice, fancier than the one me and Mum have now. Dad’s show (I wasn’t allowed to watch: “too frightening”) had been going only a couple of years at that point, but he was getting decent money out of it, and Mum was working, too. Dad’d be in his office a lot with the door shut, doing stuff for his show, but he always had time for me: In winter he’d come build a snowman with me, and in summer we’d fill up the wading pool and play with this plastic crocodile I liked. All that wholesome stuff. I remember being at the beach one evening, and Dad and me charged the seagulls, scattered them up into the air like a snowstorm in reverse.

I don’t know when things started to go wrong. I remember Mum got badly sick, the first time she ever had one of her headaches, so bad she was in hospital for a few days, and she was lying in their bed for weeks afterward. She told me much later that she was so sick they thought, for a few hours, that she might die. Anyway, Dad really went to pieces while this was going on. Up in his study all night, talking on the phone all day, saying things I couldn’t understand, languages I’d never heard anyone speak before. He was drinking a lot, too. I have this vivid memory of waking up one night and hearing someone shouting in the garden. I looked out my window and saw Dad pacing around, next to the pond. There was a full moon, I remember that, and Dad’s face and hands were really vivid and pale in the dimness. I couldn’t work out what he was doing, because I remember he sounded like he was having an argument, but with someone who wasn’t there. He’d pace and wait and seem to be listening to the dark garden, and then he’d turn and start waving his arms and shouting again. I didn’t know what to do. I definitely didn’t want him to know I’d seen him talking to himself. I went back to bed and closed my eyes.

As soon as Mum could walk again, they started arguing. Not loudly, but in hisses late at night. I remember them both being on the phone a lot. Around this time, there was a weekend when we were supposed to be going somewhere, and Mum was getting all ready and taking forever, and then as she was walking down the stairs, she started crying and sat down, and nothing Dad said could move her, and then she went back into their room and locked the door. It was at that point that he sat down on the stairs himself and told me that he and Mum weren’t going to live in the same house anymore.