Holes for Faces (30 page)

It moved under his foot—moved more than any scalp ought to be able—as he kicked it away. He was terrified what else he might tread on, but he only found the rung again. His head was nearly level with the exit from the shaft before a pulpy grasp closed around his ankle. However soft they were, the swollen fingers felt capable of dragging him down into the blackness to share it with its residents. He thrust his free hand above the shaft in a desperate appeal. Surely Lucas hadn’t felt so insulted that he’d abandoned his cousin—surely only he was out there. “Get hold of me,” Tom pleaded, and at once he had his answer.

It must have been late autumn. Because everything was bare I saw inside the house.

Dead leaves had been scuttling around me all the way from home. A chill wind kept trying to shrink my face. The sky looked thin with ice, almost as white as the matching houses that made up the estate. Some of the old people who’d been rehoused wouldn’t have known where they were on it except for the little wood, where my uncle Philip used to say the council left some trees so they could call it the Greenwood Estate. Nobody was supposed to be living in the three streets around the wood when I used to walk across the estate to help him shop.

So many people in Copse View and Arbour Street and Shady Lane had complained about children climbing from trees and swinging from ropes and playing hide and seek that the council put a fence up, but then teenagers used the wood for sex and drink and drugs. Some dealers moved into Shady Lane, and my uncle said it got shadier, and the next road turned into Cops View. He said the other one should be called A Whore Street, though my parents told him not to let me hear. Then the council moved all the tenants out of the triangle, even the old people who’d complained about the children, and boarded up the houses. By the time I was helping my uncle, people had broken in.

They’d left Copse View alone except for one house in the middle of the terrace. Perhaps they’d gone for that one because the boards they’d strewn around the weedy garden looked rotten. They’d uncovered the front door and the downstairs window, but I could never see in for the reflection of sunlight on leaves. Now there weren’t many leaves and the sun had a cataract, and the view into the front room was clear. The only furniture was an easy chair with a fractured arm. The chair had a pattern like shadows of ferns and wore a yellowish circular antimacassar. The pinstriped wallpaper was black and white too. A set of shelves was coming loose from the back wall but still displaying a plate printed with a portrait of the queen. Beside the shelves a door was just about open, framing part of a dimmer room.

I wondered why the door was there. In our house you entered the rooms from the hall. My uncle had an extra door made so he could use his wheelchair, and I supposed whoever had lived in this house might have been disabled too. There was a faint hint of a shape beyond the doorway, and I peered over the low garden wall until my eyes ached. Was it a full-length portrait or a life-size dummy? It looked as if it had been on the kind of diet they warned the girls about at school. As I made out its arms I began to think they could reach not just through the doorway but across far too much of the room, and then I saw that they were sticks on which it was leaning slightly forward—sticks not much thinner than its arms. I couldn’t distinguish its gender or how it was dressed or even its face. Perhaps it was keeping so still in the hope of going unnoticed, unless it was challenging me to object to its presence. I was happy to leave it alone and head for my uncle’s.

He lived on Pasture Boulevard, where he said the only signs of pasture were the lorries that drove past your bedroom all night. The trees along the central reservation were leafy just with litter. My uncle was sitting in the hall of the house where he lived on the ground floor, and wheeled himself out as soon as he saw me. “Sorry I made you wait, Uncle Philip,” I said.

“I’ll wait for anything that’s worth the wait.” Having raised a thumb to show this meant me, he said “And what’s my name again, Craig?”

“Phil,” I had to say, though my parents said I was too young to.

“That’s the man. Don’t be shy of speaking up. Ready for the go?”

He might have been starting a race at the school where he’d taught physical education—teaching pee, he called it—until he had his first stroke. When I made to push the chair he brought his eyebrows down and thrust his thick lips forward, which might have frightened his pupils but now made his big square face seem to be trying to shrink as the rest of him had. “Never make it easy, Craig,” he said. “You don’t want my arms going on strike.”

I trotted beside him to the Frugo supermarket that had done for most of the shops that were supposed to make the estate feel like a village. Whenever a Frugo lorry thundered past us he would mutter “There’s some petrol for your lungs” or “Hold your breath.” In the supermarket he flung a week’s supply of healthy food from the Frugorganic section into the trolley and bought me a Frugoat bar, joking as usual about how they’d turned the oats into an animal. I pushed the trolley to his flat and helped him unload it and took it back to Frugo. When I passed his window again he opened it, flapping the sports day posters he’d tacked to the wall of the room, to shout “See you in a week if you haven’t got yourself a girlfriend.”

I had the books I borrowed from the public library instead, but I didn’t need him to announce my deficiency. I knew he disapproved of girls for boys my age—they sapped your energy, he said. “I’ll always come,” I promised and made for Copse View, where the trees looked eager to wave me on. The wind gave up pushing me as I reached them, and I stopped at the house where the boards had been pulled down. As I peered across the front room, resting my fists on the crumbling wall, my eyes began to ache again. However much I stared, the dim figure with the sticks didn’t seem to have moved—not in an hour and a half. It had to be a picture; why shouldn’t whoever used to live there have put a poster up? I felt worse than stupid for taking so long to realise. My parents and the English teacher at my school said I had imagination, but I could do without that much.

Ten minutes brought me home to Woody Rise. “Well, would he?” my uncle used to say even after my parents gave up laughing or groaning. The houses on this edge of the estate were as big as his but meant for one family each—they looked as if they were trying to pass for part of the suburb that once had the estate for a park. My father was carrying fistfuls of cutlery along the hall. “Here’s the boy who cares,” he called, and asked me “How’s the wheelie kid?”

“Tom,” my mother rebuked him from the kitchen.

I thought he deserved more reproof when I wasn’t even supposed to shorten my uncle’s name, but all I said was “Good.”

As my father repeated this several times my mother said “Let’s eat in here. Quick as you like, Craig. We’ve people coming round for a homewatch meeting.”

“I thought you were going out.”

“Just put your coat on your chair for now. We’ve rescheduled our pupils for tomorrow. Didn’t we say?”

She always seemed resentful if I forgot whichever extra job they were doing when. “I suppose you must have,” I tried pretending.

“Had you found some mischief to get up to, Craig?” my father said. “Has she got a name?”

“I hope not,” my mother said. “You can welcome the guests if you like, Craig.”

“He’s already looked after my brother, Rosie.”

“And some of us have done more.” In the main this was aimed at my father, and she said more gently “All right, Craig. I expect you want to be on your own for a change.”

I would rather have been with them by ourselves—not so much at dinner, where I always felt they were waiting for me to drop cutlery or spill food. I managed to conquer the spaghetti bolognese by cutting up the pasta with my fork, though my mother didn’t approve much of that either. Once I’d washed up for everyone I was able to take refuge in my bedroom before all the neighbours came to discuss watching out for burglars and car thieves and door-to-door con people and other types to be afraid of. I needed to be alone to write.

Nobody knew I did. My stories tried to be like the kind of film my parents wouldn’t let me watch. That night I wrote about a girl whose car broke down miles from anywhere, and the only place she could ask for help was a house full of people who wouldn’t come to her. The house was haunted by a maniac who cut off people’s feet with a chainsaw so they couldn’t escape. I frightened myself with this more than I enjoyed, and when I went to sleep despite the murmur of neighbours downstairs I dreamed that if I opened my eyes I would see a figure standing absolutely still at the end of the bed. I looked once and saw no silhouette against the glow from the next street, but it took me a while to go back to sleep.

For most of Sunday my parents were out of the house. As if they hadn’t had enough of teaching at school all week, my mother did her best to coax adults to read and write while my father educated people about computers. They couldn’t help reminding me of my school, where I wasn’t too unhappy so long as I wasn’t noticed. It was in the suburb next to the estate, and some of the boys liked to punch me for stealing their park even though none of us was alive when the estate was built, while a few of the girls seemed to want me to act as uncouth as they thought people from it should be. I tried to keep out of all their ways and not to attract any questions in class. My work proved I wasn’t stupid, which was all that mattered to me. I liked English best, except when the teacher made me read out my work. I would mumble and stammer and squirm and blush until the ordeal was done. I hated her and everyone else who could hear my helplessly unmodulated voice, most of all myself.

I wouldn’t have dared admit to anyone at school that I quite liked most homework. I could take my own time with it, and there was nobody to distract me, since my parents were at night school several evenings, either teaching or improving their degrees. It must have been hard to pay the mortgage even with two teachers’ salaries, but I also thought they were competing with each other for how much they could achieve, and perhaps with my uncle as well. All this left me feeling I should do more for him, but there was no more he would let me do.

Soon it was Saturday again. I was eager to look at the house on Copse View, but once it was in sight I felt oddly nervous. I wasn’t going to avoid it by walking around the triangle. That would make me late for my uncle, and I could imagine what he would think of my behaviour if he knew. The sky had turned to chalk, and the sun was a round lump of it caught in the stripped treetops; in the flat pale light the houses looked brittle as shell. The light lay inert in the front room of the abandoned house. The figure with the sticks was there, in exactly the same stance. It wasn’t in the same place, though. It had come into the room.

At least, it was leaning through the doorway. It looked poised to jerk the sticks up at me, unless it was about to use them to spring like a huge insect across the room. While the sunlight didn’t spare the meagre furniture—the ferny chair and its discoloured antimacassar, the plate with the queen’s face on the askew shelf still clinging to the pinstriped wall—it fell short of illuminating the occupier. I could just distinguish that the emaciated shape was dressed in some tattered material—covered with it, at any rate. While the overall impression was greyish, patches were as yellowed as the antimacassar, though I couldn’t tell whether these were part of the clothes or showing through. This was also the case with the head. It appeared to be hairless, but I couldn’t make out any of the face. When my eyes began to sting with trying I took a thoughtless step towards the garden wall, and then I took several back, enough to trip over the kerb. The instant I regained my balance I dashed out of Copse View.

Perhaps there was a flaw in the window, or the glass was so grimy that it blurred the person in the room, though not the other contents. Perhaps the occupant was wearing some kind of veil. Once I managed to have these thoughts they slowed me down, but not much, and I was breathing hard when I reached my uncle’s. He was sitting in the hall again. “All right, Craig, I wasn’t going anywhere,” he said. “Training for a race?”

Before I could answer he said “Forget I asked. I know the schools won’t let you compete any more.”

I felt as if he didn’t just mean at sports. “I can,” I blurted and went red.

“I expect if you think you can that counts.”

As we made for Frugo I set out to convince him in a way I thought he would approve of, but he fell behind alongside a lorry not much shorter than a dozen houses. “Don’t let me hold you up,” he gasped, “if you’ve got somewhere you’d rather be.”

“I thought you liked to go fast. I thought it was how you kept fit.”

“That’s a lot of past tense. See, you’re not the only one that knows his grammar.”

I was reminded of a Christmas when my mother told him after some bottles of wine that he was more concerned with muscles than minds. He was still teaching then, and I’d have hoped he would have forgotten by now. He hardly spoke in the supermarket, not even bothering to make his weekly joke as he bought my Frugoat bar. I wondered if I’d exhausted him by forcing him to race, especially when he didn’t head for home as fast as I could push the laden trolley. I was dismayed to think he could end up no more mobile than the figure with the sticks.

I helped him unload the shopping and sped the trolley back to Frugo. Did he have a struggle to raise the window as he saw me outside his flat? “Thanks for escorting an old tetch,” he called. “Go and make us all proud for a week.”