A Small Free Kiss in the Dark (19 page)
I was shocked to find out that Max’s grandpa was dead, but we had to get away from the city and I didn’t know where else to go. I decided to stick to my plan. There wasn’t much to take from the House of Horrors. I had my books and Dad’s coat, and Max had his feather headdress and the medal Old Thomas had given him. We packed our blankets and bottles of milk for Sixpence. Everything else we needed was already in the truck. The only thing missing was Tia.
I looked out through the eye sockets towards the Boulevard Hotel. It was almost dark. Seagulls drifted like scraps of foil above the lights.
‘Can you see her?’ whispered Max.
I whispered, too, although there was no need. ‘Not yet.’
I said it fast; I didn’t want to talk while I was willing Tia to come. I visualised the shattered window, Billy’s clever old hands under the dashboard, and I heard the engine roar. I imagined Max and me in the back of the truck with Tia and Sixpence, warm and safe in our Feathersoft Microfibre sleeping-bags, and Billy, in a soldier’s cap and camouflage jacket, driving us through the night towards Gulliver’s Meadows.
Sometimes, when I have bad thoughts, I make a noise inside my head. It fills my ears up, like when I’m underwater, and drowns the thoughts out. While I was waiting for Tia I got some bad thoughts, like: are there such things as soldiers with long grey whiskers? How much fuel is in the tank of the truck? What would we do if we got stopped at a roadblock? So I shut my eyes and made the noise. Max was pulling on my sleeve but I didn’t pay him any attention because you have to concentrate to do the noise properly. Then I felt vibrations coming up through the soles of my feet and I knew I’d waited too long for Tia.
The House of Horrors shook as though the walls were made of cereal packets and light poured in through the cracks. The tank was back, followed by a truckload of soldiers.
Sixpence woke up and screamed with fright at the noise. I grabbed her out of the carriage and pressed her face against my chest to smother her cries. I shoved my free hand in my pocket and squeezed the tube. Milk went everywhere. Outside, the engines died and boots clattered on the concrete. Sixpence sucked in some air. I slid my finger in her mouth and she screamed again.
I had to do something or she’d get us all killed. I shoved her into Billy’s arms and pushed him and Max towards our secret entrance. ‘Get out, wait on the beach!’
The boots came closer.
I jumped off the platform and rolled underneath the wooden slats, pulling the suitcase after me. Strips of light fell through the cracks onto my face, and splashed over the walls.
‘Ghosts!’ I heard someone say, and the others laughed. The torch went out and I lay under the platform until my heart stopped banging and the truck roared away into the night.
This was the most dangerous plan I’d ever done, and already things were going wrong. I prayed that Billy would be waiting on the beach, that he’d seen the disappearing tail-lights, heard the rumble of the truck. I’d told him that the signal would be the sound of shattering glass. Would he listen for it? Would he come then or would he chicken out again?
Quiet as Archimedes’s leopard, I crept beside the Carousel of War and Peace. I passed the pinto pony with the moon on his stirrups and the wind in his mane, and I wished that Tia was sitting there in her red coat. I moved on; past the Dodgem Cars and the tin ducks in Sideshow Alley, and still she wasn’t there. Then I rounded the corner and saw the other truck nosed right up to the refreshment pavilion, and suddenly I knew where Tia would be.
The lights of the truck beamed a spotlight on the stage, and I stood in the shadows watching her dance. I can’t remember if it was the smoke or the movement I noticed first. When I turned, I saw the orange glow on the end of a cigarette and I knew Tia and I weren’t the only ones there. Two soldiers were sitting in the corner on plastic chairs, and another one was standing behind them. I pressed my back against the broken lattice wall but they were all watching Tia and hadn’t seen me. Then the soldiers who were sitting down started to clap, but not in the way people do when they think you’ve done an excellent job. They clapped slow and loud. Gradually, like the ballerina in the music box, Tia stopped dancing, as though she couldn’t hear the music inside herself any more.
One of the soldiers who’d been clapping said something. When the man standing behind him walked towards the truck, I saw it was the skinny young soldier. He opened the door and reached inside and music came belting out. Then he lit a cigarette and disappeared himself into the dark. The others clapped louder and louder until Tia started dancing again, only this time she wasn’t dancing to please herself; she was dancing to please the two soldiers in front of her.
One of them got up on the stage and ripped his camouflage shirt off. He whirled it around his head and then threw it on the ground and starting dancing with Tia. He undid the buckle on his belt, snaked it out and cracked it like a whip. The other one got up then and pulled Tia hard against him. She put her hands on his chest and tried to push him away but he laughed and pulled her back and kissed her roughly. I thought about the kiss that Tia had given me for free and I wondered if the soldier knew that she was only fifteen. I had to stop myself from screaming when I saw what they did to her next.
I didn’t know how to help Tia. The only thing that was going to save us was the truck. But Billy wasn’t there to start it. I backed slowly away from the pavilion, crept behind the truck and down the side towards the open door. Then I saw something unbelievable: a set of keys hanging in the ignition. I knew straight away what to do. I’d steal the keys and then lead the soldiers away from Tia. I knew they had guns, but there wasn’t time to come up with something better. All Tia had to do was hide and wait for us. I’d double back to the beach and find the others once I’d given the soldiers the slip. Sooner or later they’d leave, and when they did, we’d be waiting to drive away.
My muscles tensed for a quick getaway. I closed my hand around the keys, turned them, ever so slowly, and pulled.
Instantly, the lights died, the music stopped. Soldiers burst through the door of the pavilion, shouting, pulling their clothes on, grabbing their guns. I ran, dodging between the rides, twisting and turning in and out of shadows and moonlight, through the hall of mirrors – fat boy, thin boy, short boy, tall – rolling under the shooting gallery, bullets ripping through the tin ducks, real bullets. Stay away, Billy, don’t come, not yet. Behind the Dodgem Cars, lungs on fire. Lose them, double back, into the House of Horrors. I crawled under the platform to Dracula and the ghosts, lay still and prayed that Tia had got away, that Billy, Max and Sixpence were safe.
Silence, silence except for the thudding of my heart. Then Tia screamed and I flew to the spy holes. She was on her knees, her hands pressed together in front of her like she was praying. The soldier behind her jerked her head towards him with a handful of her hair. I saw the pistol in his hand and I knew he was waiting for me to show myself.
All Tia had done was what they wanted, and all I had done was watch. Surely they weren’t going to kill us. Couldn’t they see we were children? Didn’t they know we had no weapons? Maybe if I gave them their keys back? Was that a fair trade: our freedom for Tia’s life? I didn’t know, I only knew that I couldn’t let Tia die.
I burst from the House of Horrors. Tia saw me first.
‘Run, Skip, run!’ she shouted.
I threw the keys as hard as I could. They curved up into the midnight blue. For a split second the soldier looked up as they tumbled towards him like a falling star. In a single, swift movement, Tia rose on her knees, arched her arms over her head and drove her fists into his chest. He staggered, then crumpled and fell face down. Tia started towards me. She didn’t see the other soldier taking aim from behind the broken lattice, or the young one near the truck. Too late, my scream ripped through the night, jagged as saw-teeth between the shots.
The young soldier rolled his comrade onto his back and stared for a few seconds at the knife handle sticking out of his chest. Then he stood up, dropped his gun next to the other soldier, the one he’d shot, and ran behind the pavilion, vomiting all the way.
I flung myself down beside Tia, remembering the wrongness I had felt on the morning Billy discovered his knife was missing. It was only a small knife with a handle made of shell. It was blunt from opening tins and picking locks and other useful things. I didn’t think you could kill a man with a knife like that. But Tia did. She did it so the rest of us could get away.
Lights blazed at the hotel, engines revved, doors slammed and sirens howled. I grabbed the keys off the ground, but what to do? There was only me. I’d never driven anything. Where was Billy? Where were Max and Sixpence? Would they come? Should I leave Tia and try to find them; come back later?
Trucks wound down the corkscrew hill. The young soldier stopped throwing up. He’d seen me.
Then Billy walked out from behind the carousel with Sixpence on his back and Max beside him, and everything we needed for our one last chance.
‘Get in, Max!’ I hissed. ‘We’ve got to leave. Now!’ I didn’t want him to look at Tia and the dead soldiers.
Billy and me put our hands together underneath Tia and moved her across to the truck, but we couldn’t lift her high enough to put her in the back.
The other trucks were closing in.
I wanted to be with Max. I wanted Billy to drive us away before it was too late, but I couldn’t leave Tia there.
I saw the young soldier running towards us. Three guns lay on the ground between us. Billy’s eyes met mine, our hands gripped tight underneath Tia. His face looked afraid, like my heart. Then the soldier did something I never thought he’d do. He took Tia in his arms, but not like the other soldiers; he took her from us with gentle hands, lifted her up and laid her down in the dark next to Max. He took off his big coat and put it over her. After he helped Billy up, he put his hand out to me and I put the golden keys into it because I knew he’d figured out that he was on the Third Side.
Sandbags scattered and barricades splintered as the truck hurtled through the first checkpoint. We lay low in the back as bullets sizzled past us. The soldier took a crazy, twisted route, nosing through narrow streets in silent suburbs with no streetlights and no headlights. Our truck driver was a murderer. They were looking for him because he did the worst thing: he killed a comrade; killed him for a beautiful fifteen-year-old girl who stuck a blunt pocketknife into a soldier’s chest so that her baby daughter and her friends could go free. He did it because he was on the Third Side, that didn’t believe in war.
I wondered if it had been Tia or me that he’d killed, would the others have tried to hunt him down? I wondered if he’d been sent to war, like Old Thomas was, or maybe he was like my dad and thought it would be an adventure. All I knew, with every part of me, was that he was in a war he didn’t want to be in and no one was going to tell him he could go home.
I held the torch while Billy wrapped Tia in torn sheets to stop the bleeding. But with each new strip of rag he added we saw the blood soak through, redder than her coat. We covered her with the soldier’s coat again and then Billy and I lay, one each side of her, trying to keep her warm, trying to stop her from moving while the truck swerved and swayed through unfamiliar streets. Sixpence slept on my chest, warm and soft and alive in her pouch, and Billy held Max in his arms. I closed my eyes tight and tried to hear the music that was inside Tia, but all I could hear was the sound of her lungs trying to squeeze her heavy red breath in and out, in and out.
Through the night we drove in a tangle of waking and sleeping, nightmares from hell and holy white dreams. In my waking I thought about the soldier and wondered if he knew where he was going. I remembered his pale, sweating face and his shaking hands when I gave him the keys. I saw Billy sit up like a grey ghost and look out into the darkness. He bent low over Tia and made the sign of the cross the way he had on poor Bradley Clark. I wanted to tell him he was wrong, that he’d made a mistake, that Tia was still alive. But I knew it was only my own body heat making her warm.