Holes for Faces (19 page)

The fog stayed among the fields, allowing him to drive faster along the promenade. He parked the car and let himself into the house and plodded upstairs to sit on the bed, where he brought up Gwyneth’s last text message on his phone, the goodnight she’d sent while dining with her friends. It wasn’t the same as hearing her voice. How old was the message now? Not old enough for him to forget—never that—and he held onto the phone when he lay down.

He thought he hadn’t slept when it rang. He clutched it and sat up on the bed, which felt too bare and wide by half. On the bedside table the photograph of him with Gwyneth in the sunlit mountains far away was waiting to be seen once more, and beyond it the curtains framed a solitary feeble midnight star. He rubbed his aching eyes to help them focus on the mobile as he thumbed the keypad. “Hello?” he said before he’d finished lifting the phone to his face.

“Forgive me, is this Charlie?”

Long ago he’d learned he had no option but to go through it all again. Perhaps this time Gwyneth would open her eyes—perhaps she would even see him. “Charles Tunstall,” he had to say, “yes.”

As Robbie watched his mother he felt ten years old, but it wasn’t unwelcome for once. She looked as she used to when they played board games together; her eyes would calm down while her face hid its lines until she seemed no older than she was, hardly twice the age he’d racked up now. She’d been happy to concentrate on just one thing, and it included him. He was buoyed up by the memory until she glanced away from the computer screen in the front room and saw him.

Did she think he was spying on her through the window, the way his father had after they’d split up? Her head jerked back as if her frown had pinched her face hard, and Robbie hurried to let himself into the house. Her bicycle and rucksack had narrowed the already narrow hall. As he dumped his schoolbag on the stairs she was snatching pages from the printer, so hastily that one sailed out of her grasp. “Leave it, Robbie,” she said.

“I’m only getting it for you.”

It was a cinema poster headed
CHUCK IN THE DOCK
. Most of it consisted of a doll’s wickedly gleeful round young face, which was held together with stitches that looked bloody even in black and white. Whatever it was advertising would be shown over the weekend at the Merseyscreen multiplex as part of the Liberating Liverpool arts festival, which was all Robbie had time to learn before his mother reached for the sheet. “Well, now you’ve had a good look after you were told not to,” she said.

“What’s all that for?”

“Something you mustn’t see.”

“I just did.”

“That isn’t clever. That’s nothing but sly.” Once she’d finished giving him a disappointed look she said “It’s about films I don’t want you ever to watch.”

There were so many of those he’d lost count, if he was counting—any with fights or guns or knives, which could make him behave like boys did, or bombs, though mostly grownups used those, or language, which didn’t seem to leave him much. “More of them,” he said.

“I won’t have you turning into a man like your father. Too many of you think it’s your right to bully women and do a lot worse to them.” Before Robbie dared to ask what she was leaving unsaid, which was very little where his father was concerned, she added “I’m not saying you’re like that yet. Just don’t be ever.”

“Why did you print all that out? What’s it for?”

“It’s time we took more of a stand.” He guessed she meant Mothers Against Mayhem as she said “They’re evil films that should never be shown. They were supposed to be banned everywhere in Liverpool. They get inside children and make them act like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like that thing,” she said and poked the pages she’d laid face down on the table. “Now that’s all. You’re bullying me.” She gazed harder at him while she said “Promise me you’ll never watch any of those films.”

“Promise.”

“Let’s see your hands.”
            He felt younger again, accused of being unclean. While he hadn’t crossed his fingers behind his back, he didn’t think he had quite promised either. Eventually she said “You’d better put dinner on. We’ve a meeting at Midge’s.”

Midge was the tutor on her assertiveness course and the founder of Mothers Against Mayhem. Robbie sidled past the bicycle to the kitchen, which was even smaller than the front room, and switched on the oven. He still felt proud of learning to cook, though he would never have said so at school. He only wished his mother wouldn’t keep reminding him that his father was unable or unwilling even to boil an egg. He watched bubbles pop on the surface of the casserole of scouse, a spectacle that put him in mind of a monster in another sort of film he wasn’t meant to view. Gloves too fat for a killer in a film to wear helped him transfer the casserole to the stained mat the table always sported. “Mmm,” his mother said and “Yum,” despite eating less and faster than Robbie. “Enough for dinner tomorrow,” she declared. “Have you got plenty of homework?”

“A bit. A lot really.”

“Give it all you’ve got.” She was already shrugging her rucksack on. “I don’t know how late I’ll be,” she said as she wheeled her bicycle to the front door. “If I’m not here you know when to go to bed.”

He left the stagnant casserole squatting on its mat while he washed up the dinner items before making for the front room. Like the television, the computer was inhibited by all the parental locks his mother could find. He logged on to find an essay about Liverpool poets, and changed words as he copied it into his English homework book. He was altering the last paragraph when his mobile rang.
            It no longer had a Star Wars ringtone since his mother decided that was about war. Robbie didn’t give peace much of a chance—he silenced the chorus before they had time to chant all they were saying. “Is that Duncan Donuts?” he said.

“If that’s Robin Banks.”

His father had named Robbie for a Liverpool footballer, but now his mother told people he was called after a singer. “My mam’s with your mam,” Duncan said. “All mams together.”

“The midge got them.”

“More like the minge did.”

This went too far for Robbie’s tastes. “What are you doing tonight?”

“What do you think? I’m in the park.”

“Just finishing my homework.”

“Wha?” Duncan improved on this by adding “Doing your housework?”

“Homework,” Robbie said, not without resentment. “I’m on the last lap.”

“Whose?” Duncan didn’t wait for an answer. “Hurry up or I’ll of smoked it all.”

Robbie found some words to change as he transcribed the paragraph. Shutting the computer down, he hurried out of the house. Across the road Laburnum Place was just a pair of stubby terraces of houses almost as compressed as his, but the next street—Waterworks Street—led to the park. A wind urged clouds across the black October sky while another brought a thick stink up from the grain silos at the Seaforth docks. Robbie heard explosions and saw violent glares along the cross streets, but war hadn’t broken out yet; they were premature fireworks, and the huge prolonged crash behind him wasn’t the work of a bomb—it was another delivery of scrap at the yard beyond the Strand shopping mall.

A pedestrian crossing guarded by nervous amber beacons ended at the park gates. Shadows of bushes sprawled across the concrete path leading to a disused bandstand. Sleepy pigeons fluttered on the cupola as if waiting to compete for a position on the birdless weathervane. There was no sign of Duncan inside the railings that encircled the bandstand, but Robbie located him by the smell of skunk.

The other thirteen-year-old was sitting on the balustrade at the top of a wide flight of steps that climbed beside a bowling green. Above him a noseless whitish statue on a pedestal brandished the stump of a wrist like the victim of a maniac with a cleaver. Behind the statue a deserted basketball court was overlooked by houses at least twice the size of Robbie’s. Duncan must have watched him search around the bandstand, since the vantage point commanded a view in every direction. Robbie ran up the steps two at a time as leaves slithered underfoot, crunching like a baby’s bones. “Give us some,” he said.

Though Duncan hadn’t finished the fat joint, perhaps he had already smoked one. He took a drag before passing Robbie the remains. “It’s fucking special, that,” he gasped as he laboured to contain the smoke.

Robbie inhaled as much as he could and held it until he had to let some of it out through his nose. More emerged in a series of belches while Duncan had another toke. “You’re right,” Robbie said, or someone using his voice did.

“Wha?”

“It’s special.”

“Fucking special.”

“Fucking,” Robbie had to agree as, with a rumble, the world started to collapse. It was another crash of scrap down by the river, but he could barely hold onto that sense of it. The statue pointed the gun barrel of its arm at a silhouetted tree, bits of which swelled up to flap across the park. Fallen leaves cawed as a tree took them back, and he was afraid he’d smoked too much too soon. In a bid to recover control of the teeming interior of his skull he said “Do you know what they’re talking about?”

“The crows? They’s saying they’s black. Respect, man,” Duncan called to them.

“Not them.” Robbie laughed, but it didn’t help much. “The mams,” he said.

“Can’t hear them. Can you?”

“Course I can’t,” Robbie said, hoping their voices wouldn’t invade the cavern above his eyes. “I know what they’re disgusting, though.”

He wasn’t sure if he’d intended to use the wrong word. “Wha?” Duncan said.

“The most evillest film anyone’s ever made anywhere ever.”

Duncan passed him the smouldering roach. As the tip reddened like a warning light he said “Bet I know which.”

Robbie exhaled the token toke as if he were anxious to discover “Which?”

“Chucky. One of his.”

The idea lit Duncan’s face up. It glared pale as plastic, and lines like stitches pinched his red eyes narrow while his teeth gleamed unnaturally white. The jagged lines were shadows of twigs cast by a firework in the sky, however much they lingered, and Robbie tried to erase them by asking “How did you know that?”

“Give us that if you’re not having it.” Duncan sucked the roach down to his fingertips and doused it on his tongue and threw his head back to swallow it. At last he said “I know everything, that’s why. You turn into a puppet if you watch those films.”

“Films can’t do that. They’re just films.”

“Those ones can. It started round here.”

Robbie had a notion that he already knew all this, and yet he had to ask “What did?”

“Two kids killed a littler one like Chucky does. It was up the road when my mam was living with my real dad before they had me. And then some bigger kids tortured some girl and they were listening to Chucky when they did. A man that had a shop with Chucky videos by the Strand, someone smashed the window and stabbed him with the glass. Chucky does that to people, and a kid in Liverpool stabbed his mam’s friend and said Chucky made him. And there was a Paki shop up the road they set fire to because he had magazines with Chucky in them.”

Robbie was distracted by a sense of being spied upon. The watchful face was on a screen. He glanced towards it and saw curtains bring the film to an end—no, fall shut at the window of a house beyond the basketball court. “Want to see him?” Duncan said.

Robbie saw shadows clawing their way up through the concrete paths. Pigeons shivered as they strutted across the dim stage of the bandstand like the opening act of a show whose star performer was about to appear. Surely their feathers were only trembling in the wind. “Where?” he risked asking.

“At mine next time they have a meeting.”

“You’ve never got those films.”

“I can get them whenever I want them, and lots of others she doesn’t like too.”

“Why don’t we get some of those? Can you get—”

“You’re not scared of Chucky, are you?” Duncan’s grin widened as if stitches were about to split his cheeks. “Godzillions of kids have watched him and they haven’t done anything. Even girls,” he said and let his grin drop. “If we smoke enough we’ll be too stoned for him to make us.” His gaze strayed past Robbie, and he slipped down from the balustrade. “Time we went,” he said.

Robbie twisted around to see red and blue fireworks in the gateway beyond the basketball court. They were the roof lights of a police car, and Duncan had already dodged behind the cleaver victim’s plinth. “Don’t go that way,” Robbie had to whisper in case the crows raised the alarm. “Someone in those houses called the police.”

“I’m not going. I’m gone,” Duncan said and crouched lower. “You go somewhere else.”

Robbie was sure that if he encountered the police his face would betray him, grinning too much while he struggled not to grin. He retreated down the steps and showed Duncan his severed head. “Catch you at school. Me, not the police.”

“They won’t bother much about kids having a smoke. Wait till they’ve gone and we’ll skin up again.”

“You can,” Robbie said and ran down the steps, desperate to leave behind the swarms of beetles that crunched underfoot. The police might hear that, or the applause his sprint past the bandstand earned from his pigeon audience. He skidded to a halt at the gates that framed the pedestrian crossing, where the beacons were trying to measure his pulse, and then he dashed across the road. Lights flared down the cross streets, but they were fireworks, not police speeding to cut him off. Nobody grabbed him from behind as his key scrabbled to let him into the house.