Silent Children (10 page)

"Bert. Bert Walker."

"You won't be wanting to hang around me."

Her gaze hadn't shifted—he wasn't sure she'd even blinked. The queue behind him was trying to distract him with several impatient voices. "Why not?" he demanded.

"Not unless you've got some teeth to put in there for me."

She was saying he wouldn't be able to deal with her bacon sandwiches. "I'll have to make do with porridge," he said, sidling along the counter to her colleague, who dug her ladle into the tureen of bubbling white sludge and raised her shrunken bright-eyed face, unwrinkling her leathery neck. "You'll need to get them seen to," she advised him.

"What?"

She doubled her volume and halved her speed. "You ought to get yourself fixed up with some teeth."

From a nearby table came a dull clang of metal against china, and a shout with some consonants missing. "What's that about teeth?"

"Not yours, Tom. I'm telling our new friend he needs some."

Hector turned from the counter with his bowl of porridge glistening with milk to find toothless caved-in Tom watching him. There was a seat on the bench opposite Tom, and he took it, hitching up his rucksack on his shoulder. While he waited for the porridge to stop steaming, he found blood on his gums with his tongue and ignored the way Tom was tugging at his own lower lip to expose the lack within. At last the porridge looked cool enough for Hector to risk a spoonful, which he was lifting to his mouth when Tom let out a snarl and a more than generous amount of moisture. "Looking for some teeth for yourself last night, was you? Find some under my pillow?"

"I'd stick nothing in my mouth that's been anywhere near yours, believe me." Hector tipped the spoon into his mouth and champed the porridge with his gums, only to find that it was still too hot for them. The ache blazed through them and pierced his brain, and he leaned across the table, spitting porridge into Tom's face. "Want to search me? Want to stick your fingers up my arse to see if I've hidden them there, is that your style?"

The priest hurried over, pulling at his polo-neck as if he'd only just discovered that he'd forgotten to wear his clerical collar. "Some disagreement here, chaps? Can I take an overview? I'm sure it should prove helpful."

"Someone nicked my teeth while I was asleep," Tom said more sullenly than distinctly, wiping his face.

Hector subsided onto the bench and loaded his mouth with a spoonful of porridge from the edge of the bowl. If his gums had been able to flinch, they would have. He sucked in a breath to lower the temperature, then he swallowed the searing mouthful and threw the spoon on top of the pasty mass. "Want a poke round in my bag to see if there's any teeth in it?"

"I'm sure that won't be necessary. I'm sure Tom—"

"I've got a voice in my head, padre, thanks ever so buggering much. It's teeth I haven't got, and as long as he's saying we can look in his bag—"

"That's it. I'm not staying here to be called a thief. Thanks for the bed and the prayer meeting, and you're welcome to this slop."

"Hang on, please. Do please hang on, what's his name, Bert? Bert, please don't fly off, I'm sure between the three of us we can—"

That was all Hector heard before he was out of earshot. As he tramped along the corridor and up the stone stairs he mouthed his thanks to Tom, who had given him an excuse to leave so ostentatiously that nobody would suspect him of having anything to hide. When the steps brought him into the sunlight beside the cathedral, he shrugged off his rucksack and dug among the few clothes it contained as he limped into the enormous porch. Having retrieved both sets of Tom's teeth, he dunked them in the font and sloshed them about in the holy water until he considered them clean enough for his mouth.

They didn't fit. Tom's mouth had appeared to be the same size as his, but the teeth were more curved than Hector's gums, if only slightly. When he tried to force them into place, first with his hands and then by closing his jaws with the teeth jammed between them, he felt as though he was grinding his gums raw all the way to the bone. "If I chuck them back in your water," he mumbled, relaxing his jaws, "will you make them fit? That wouldn't be much of a miracle, would it?" The teeth chattered while he spoke as if they were urging him to make the act of faith, and for an instant he contemplated it, until he realised that then he would be as deranged as the worst of Adele's residents. Adele... He spat the teeth and several crimson blots into the font and trudged away from the cathedral.

It didn't take his feet long to remind him they were capable of aching as badly as his gums. He couldn't go on like this. He was out in the open again, beneath a sky as bright as any child's room. Wherever he walked he would encounter children sooner or later—the world was crawling with them—and what might he have to do if he wasn't able to make them laugh? He couldn't hide from himself, but at least he could try to hide from them. And however long it took him to get there, however painful the journey might be, he'd thought where he could hide.

Ian was so disappointed not to be home from school to help their new tenant move in that Jack let him assist with the unpacking instead. When Leslie returned from work that Friday, she found the Nova parked outside the house and heard two pitches of male laughter in the back bedroom. Jack was transferring the last few shirts into the wardrobe from one of a pair of large suitcases while Ian lifted books out of a carton with a thoughtfulness she'd never previously seen him show for books. "Mom, can I read this one?" he said.

These days his asking permission for anything was exceptional. "Better ask Mr. Lamb."

"Jack," Jack said to both of them. "Your mom mightn't be too happy with you reading that, Ian, or trying to sound like me either."

"I don't mind if you don't," Leslie said, having leaned across the bed, the quilt yielding beneath her hand, to glance at the apparently unillustrated black cover on which the title and his name were composed of bones.
"The Old Monster
isn't for children, then."

"Is that what it sounds like? Could be that's why it didn't do so well."

"We'll let Ian give you his opinion. At least it's a book, not a video."

"Great," Ian said, and hugged the fat book.

"Maybe not that great," Jack told him. "The scariest part is the author photograph."

As Ian turned the book over, the front caught the light and flashed Leslie a glimpse of a malevolent old face grinning like a skull. She preferred the image on the back, of the author with hair streaming over his shoulders, with a smile that looked close to having been held a moment too long. From the youthfulness of the photograph, not least its hint of vanished brashness, she guessed the book to be five or six years old. She pushed herself up from the bed and smoothed the quilt as Ian lifted a hand to stifle his mirth. "It's okay to laugh, trust me," Jack said.

"Okay then, I won't."

Leslie didn't know whether he was so ready to please Jack because he was American, or from Hollywood, or a writer, or even just a man, and she was content not to care. "Let's let Jack settle in for a while."

"I was going to show him some tricks with my word processor," Jack said.

"In that case I'll leave you men to entertain each other while I get on with dinner."

"Do you need to fix it?"

"It won't take long. It isn't too elaborate a welcome, I'm afraid. I didn't know what you liked."

"Can it wait until tomorrow? Then why don't you save it and I'll buy you both dinner. I feel like celebrating where I've ended up."

Ian was pretending to read the blurb of the novel and imperfectly concealing an expression not unlike the one Melinda would have worn if she'd observed the situation. "Did you have anywhere special in mind?" Leslie said.

"I don't know this part of town too well yet. If you have a favourite I can drive wherever you like."

"And not drink."

"You have to get used to that in Angel City. That and having to tell the same story over and over until it doesn't feel like a story any more."

"Sorry, telling a story..."

"To movie producers, in case they're the one who buys what you're offering."

"Someone still could even though you're over here, do you think? If you want to share a bottle there's a good Chinese restaurant down on the main road we could walk to."

"Sounds fine to me if it does to Ian."

Ian was reading the first page of
The Old Monster.
"It's good," he said without looking up.

She steered him, still reading, out of the room. She watched him make his slow way downstairs, turning another page as he reached the hall, before she went into her room to choose an outfit. Her favourites all had something to do with Roger. For months that hadn't bothered her, but now, inexplicably and so even more annoyingly, it did. The black dress she'd worn for clubbing with him in the West End, the ankle-length cream silk he'd bought for her last birthday, the pert red one to which she'd treated herself for their second honeymoon, a weekend spent in Paris while eleven-year-old Ian had given her mother plenty to criticise once she'd handed Leslie a brimming cup of boiling tea to keep her seated... She was only going out for a Chinese meal, for heaven's sake. Eventually, after a session of holding clothes in front of herself as though she were the sort of cardboard figure she used to dress when she was little, she put on the white silk blouse and pinstriped skirt and jacket she'd worn for the opening of the shop, a costume that had certainly pleased Melinda. She hooked silver stars into her earlobes and dabbed perfume behind her ears, and stepped out of the bedroom to meet Ian on his way upstairs. "Will I do?" she said.

"More than that," Jack said, emerging from his room.

He was wearing a white linen jacket, pale grey knife-edged slacks, a dark grey shirt and slim back tie. "You will too," she was able to say without blushing, for which she was far too old, and walked lightly downstairs to let them all out of the house.

Janet from next door and Mrs. Lancing were in conversation halfway along Jericho Close. They turned as Jack, having held the gate for both the Ameses, closed it with a snap of the latch. "Hello, Leslie and Ian," Janet said, "and hello..."

"Jack," Ian said with a proprietary air.

"Jack Lamb," said Jack.

"I'm Leslie's neighbour Janet Hargreaves. Welcome to Wembley."

Mrs. Lancing had kept her gaze on him but swung her head aside as if attending to a commentary. "Aren't you quite a long way from home?" she not so much asked as informed him.

"Not any more."

"It's the kind of place you'd live, is it, in America?"

"It's the kind of hospitality I'd hope for, sure enough."

"And have you and Mrs. Ames known each other long?"

"Feels like it."

Leslie hardly hesitated. "I'd say that too."

"You'll have met here, I suppose, since Ian and his parents never managed a trip to America."

"Last week. The day you watched me arriving," Jack said. "I saw Leslie had a room to let. Turned out it was just the place for me to work on my new book."

"So do we take it that you work from home?"

"That's how I'd like to think of it, sure."

"I imagine it will do no harm to have another adult in the house to keep a check on things."

Leslie opened her mouth, but Jack was faster. "Seems to me Mrs. Ames is doing, you'll forgive me if you need to, goddamned fine under all the circumstances, and Ian's shaping up pretty well too if people give him the chance."

"Well—"

"Which is how it is with most of us, I was going to say."

"And I was about to say we're all entitled to our opinion."

"You bet, only maybe some—"

"I can tell one of us is starving," Leslie said, steering Ian away with an arm around his shoulders. "See you, Janet. Come for coffee soon."

Leslie's party was at the corner of Jericho Close when Jack said "Sorry if I said too much back there. Full of words, that's my problem."

"I don't think either of us was complaining, were we, Ian?" She might have taken Jack's arm if that wouldn't have seemed too forward, not to mention the risk of embarrassing Ian. Instead she was doubly, if silently, appreciative of being doubly escorted to the main road.

They were nearly at the restaurant when a boy who was emerging from a newsagent's stood and stared at them. He was about Ian's age, wearing leather and chains, and had a dull somewhat pudgy face that Leslie took to be the product of depression and too much junk food. He gripped his thighs, digging his thumbs into them, and scowled after Ian. "Friend of yours?" Jack murmured.

"Rupe Duke? He's nobody's friend much."

"Good Lord, that's who he is, of course." When Jack had closed the door of the restaurant behind them Leslie explained "He's the brother of the little girl... you know, the little girl..."

"Should anybody talk to him right now?"

"I think it's best left, Jack, if that isn't too English of me. Do you ever speak to him at school, Ian?"

"He isn't in my class."

That was presumably as much of an answer as Ian wanted to give, and Leslie was afraid that insisting might make him revert to his previous taciturn self. She followed the waiter to the table, where Jack told her and Ian more than once to order whatever they liked, after which he nearly deceived her by pretending to be the kind of American who ordered a meal and then asked the kitchen to hold the sauce, and succeeded in persuading Ian that there was a Cantonese delicacy called Butterfly Wing Soup, consisting of water in which the wings of butterflies were soaked until they vanished, and produced two lines of a limerick for Leslie—

"When he's writing his music, Ry Cooder Shouts out words that are ruder and ruder..."

—before desisting with a droll apologetic look. He challenged Ian to pick up the smallest amount of rice with chopsticks, though it looked as if Leslie would beat both of them until Jack lifted a single grain of rice to his apologetically smiling mouth. By this time Leslie had seen off more of the second bottle of Chablis than he had, thanks to his refilling her glass whenever it was on the way to being empty, as he told Ian tales of his boyhood, trout fishing with his grandfather who could trail his fingers in a stream to call a fish, helping in the auto repair shop Jack's three uncles and his father owned, his mother teaching him to play basketball at midnight in a floodlit cage, the years of Thanksgiving dinners where all the aunts told him he wouldn't be a man until he could carry the twenty-pound bird by himself to the table... By now Leslie felt mellow from head to foot, even a shade unsteady when at last they abandoned the remains of dinner, so that outside the restaurant she had no hesitation in accepting the support of Jack's arm.