Silent Children (17 page)

"I know, dad. You mightn't have been so bothered for those children if you'd been happier with me."

"We shouldn't blame ourselves for the past. It's what you are now that counts. You've been reborn, is that it?"

"You don't mind, do you?"

"How could I when you've come back to me? I feel born again myself. I did when I came out of the sea, and now here I am lying in the sand again."

"You oughtn't to stay here much longer, dad. You don't want people hearing you talking to me."

"Where am I supposed to go tonight? I can't sleep at the shelter again, not when that woman left her handbag open with a bag of change in it. She looked like she had plenty, and she's there for the benefit of folk like I'm having to pretend I am, but she mightn't see it that way."

"There must be other shelters you can walk to in a day, aren't there? Now you've got some money you don't even need to walk."

"They don't let anyone who looks like me on public transport. Do you reckon they would if I told them I was an actor made up for a film? I'm a celebrity right enough. Maybe I should tell them."

"That'd be a laugh, except remember you don't want to draw attention to—"

A sound like the whoosh of an arrow followed by an impact silenced him. He thought a child was playing at archery somewhere nearby until he recalled where he was. He squirmed his arms through the straps of the rucksack and inched his head over the top of the bunker, feeling as though the early sunlight were a lid he had to raise. He was in time to see a second tweedy female golfer take a stroke before they strolled away from him across the grass. He scrambled out of the bunker and limped as fast as his stiff aching legs would carry him after his shrinking shadow across the deserted greens to the road.

Last night he'd been unable to think of anywhere else to sleep. He was sick of shelters full of people he had to keep reminding himself he wasn't like, but he'd allowed himself to be distracted by Adele's rejection of him. If it hadn't been for the miracle of their son's rebirth, a miracle she deserved never to learn of, Hector might have turned into the vagrant he'd been forced to play. Now that he was no longer alone—no longer the outcast his wife, his own wife, had tried to make of him—he was going to be able to restore himself.

He headed southwest into Barnet, keeping to the parks and open spaces wherever he could, restraining himself from baring his gums at the people he skirted, all of whom clearly felt they had more of a right to be there than he had. Dogs being taken for walks yapped at him, and once he had to give a wide berth to party of schoolchildren led by a teacher: though not a wail or a complaint was to be heard from them, he didn't want to risk imagining there might be. He heard the children laugh at the spectacle of him, of the shabby unshaven lank-maned old man with his tortoise neck poking up beyond his shell of a rucksack, and nearly spun around in case a toothless grin might earn him more laughter. Then he heard the teacher rebuking them, and did his best to hasten out of sight before he could feel responsible for having caused them any grief.

A length of road posted with pensioners leaning on wheeled baskets while they deplored the world, including him, eventually let him into a park that greeted him with an increasingly less muted roar—the noise of the motorway that stood above the foot of Mill Hill. As he plodded lopsidedly down a slope patched with grass, past a selection of the unemployed using cans of lager to ensure they didn't grow dehydrated, he felt as if he were descending into a medium that could drown any sound he would rather not hear. He was beginning to trust the promise of calm when he heard a child's wail behind him.

Pain flared from his left shoulder to his right ear as he twisted his head around. A woman so obese he couldn't judge if she was pregnant was dragging a boy about six years old down the path. The large flowers printed on her dress were half the size of her breasts, which were sagging nearly to her stomach. "Right, that's done it," she was vowing. "No Burger King for you today, you little brat."

The boy's wail faltered while he took in her words, then it doubled in volume and piteousness. Hector fled toward the motorway, but its noise couldn't blot out the child's woe, and Hector was unable to outdistance him and his mother. Hector was yards short of the foot of the slope, and maddened not just by the wailing but by the jerky dance of the rucksack on his spine, when she shouted "You make one more sound and I'm selling your bike."

Hector held his breath as if that might silence the boy. When the cry renewed itself, more despairing than ever, he raised his hands toward his ears, then swung around in a crouch. The boy's face was red and distorted and streaked with all its fluids. "That's the finish," the woman yelled. "You're not having your mates round tomorrow."

Hector had made things worse by looking. His hands closed on the air and hauled him upright. "Stop it now, son," he blurted. "She just wants you not to cry. Give us a laugh instead. See, here's a worm coming out of its hole, a big worm, look."

He would have thought the boy incapable of producing a worse or louder noise, but that was the child's response to the sight of Hector's tongue squeezing itself between his gums. The woman jerked the boy's thin arm so hard he almost fell over. "Get a move on, you. No cartoons for you today and no MTV. The moment we get home you're going to bed."

A convulsion widened the boy's mouth, and Hector held up his hands that wouldn't quite stop being claws. "Pardon me, madam, but you're just upsetting him. He'll never stop if you keep saying things like that."

The woman stared at him as though he had revealed himself to be even worse than his appearance, then she stumped at him, her flesh from her swollen ankles to the pouches of her face wobbling at every step. "Piss off out of it, you smelly old tramp. What do you think you are, a social worker?" she demanded, yanking the boy past him. "As for you, just wait till I get you home. I'll teach you to make a show of me."

Hector limped after her, extending his crooked fingers. "Madam, please don't take it out of him because of me. Poor little soul, he hasn't done anything to deserve—"

She turned on him, dragging the boy on the toes of his sandals. "If you don't piss off right now," she warned, so loudly that several of the drinkers on the grass laughed and applauded, "I'll get the police to you and we'll see what you deserve."

He'd already drawn too much attention, and he didn't want to begin to imagine what he might have brought upon the helpless miserable child. He watched the woman march out of the park and turn the corner of a narrow nondescript street, the boy at the end of her flaccid balloon of an arm having to scamper and stumble and scamper again to keep up, and then he lurched under the motorway. Its roar trailed over him and rose above him to wait on the far side of the pedestrian tunnel, so that he felt as if he couldn't shake it off—as if it were adding itself to the weight of his rucksack, which might have been his guilt rendered solid.

He'd fled at least a mile through a tangle of streets before he felt sufficiently unobserved to give himself some reassurance. He limped under a railway and heard the lines squeal at him, and dodged into a park where he could sit on the banks of a stream. Nobody was watching as he took out the photograph album. The stream carried on its introverted monologue while he gazed at the picture until he was sure of it and himself. "I know you're there, son," he murmured. "I'll be with you soon. I'm not mad, am I? I'm not going mad."

Wembley, England. An average day in an average suburb. Small neat houses, small neat lives. Bright summer sunlight. Children playing; children visiting one another's homes.

But there's one house where a child came to visit and

"Yeah, right," Jack muttered, and needed little more reflection to add "Crap." Having deleted the sentences, he raised his eyes so that his mind wouldn't be deadened by the blank screen. Beyond the back gardens separated by a narrow alley, the roofs and their dormant chimneys dovetailed with a sunned blue sky. Miles above them the silver brooch of an airliner slipped off the wadding of a cloud, and from the main road he heard the rattle of the rear door of a truck. Otherwise the streets outside his open window were as silent as the airliner; there wasn't a child to be heard—not because the children of the suburb were afraid to make a sound within earshot of Leslie's house, but because they were at school.

Wembley, England. An early afternoon in summer. The small, neat suburban houses doze in the heat and stillness. Soon the children will be home from school to wake them up. But one child

"Useless," Jack told himself, and sent the fragment of a paragraph back into the nothingness that had produced it. He knew he didn't have to keep his opening lines in the final version—they could just be his route to the material he would keep—but these seemed less meaningful than the hollow clatter of the keyboard, they felt like an absolute failure to grasp what he ought to be writing. Did he need to rid himself of habits he'd learned from years of writing fiction as distanced from reality as possible? Or was his problem simply that there was no point in struggling with the first lines when he'd yet to come up with a title he liked?

At least selecting a title would let him feel he was writing. He opened a file for titles and gazed at the sky, which had taken its clouds off. He managed to ignore the faint impatient hum of the word processor until he had a thought worth typing, and it was followed by another that brought its close relative along.

THE HOUSE THAT CAN'T FORGET
THE LEGACIES OF MURDER
INHERITORS OF MURDER

They were pretty good titles, but not for this book. It wasn't just about Leslie and her house, not even mostly. No wonder he was having trouble with the book if he couldn't keep his mind on its theme. Maybe he needed a title to remind him:

CHILD KILLER
THE MAN WHO BURIED CHILDREN
SILENCED CRIES

They were enough. Just because the book had to deal with the man behind it all, Jack didn't have to start with him. He still wanted to begin with Leslie and her house, with the way she'd been identified with a history she had never been part of, as if because the public needed somebody alive to blame, she would have to do. Once he'd written that chapter he could show it to publishers while he continued his research. He wanted the chapter to represent his best work.

There were things he couldn't write. He would have to leave out how Leslie felt in bed—her soft firm breasts, her cool lips and inventively responsive tongue that tasted faintly of toothpaste, her long legs squeezing his waist—and he didn't think he would even be able to include how she'd made him feel more accepted than he would have dared hope. Nevertheless he had let her believe he'd revealed his plans for the book without being prompted, and he'd implicated Ian in the deception as well. Perhaps he wouldn't be able to write honestly until he was open with Leslie—until he admitted that his visit to her shop had been no coincidence.

He'd been in England for just a few days, a writer abandoned by public taste and searching for a way of renewing himself, when he'd learned about her house from a piece in the
Evening Standard
and known at once that it was where he had to go. He'd been studying it to form a first impression before he ventured closer when Leslie and Ian had come out together. When they'd separated at the main road, Ian dodging a kiss, Jack had followed her to work. Once she'd disappeared into the staff room at the rear of the shop he'd strolled past the window, only to be halted by her notice. He'd walked through the secretive alleys of Soho while he came to terms with his luck, and then he'd veered back to the shop.

How would she react when she discovered he'd been scheming? Perhaps she might think it was only as odd as writers were supposed to be, but she was entitled to feel deceived, used, even betrayed. He ought to meet her for lunch, if only so that Ian's presence wouldn't inhibit him from saying too much, and he was about to head for the phone when it rang.

He felt as though she'd sensed his need. He swung himself out of the swivel chair and ran downstairs. Whyever she was calling, he wouldn't let her go until they had a date. He held onto the banister and leaned off the stairs to snatch the receiver. "Hi," he said, followed by "Hello?"

This brought him no response either. "Hello," he repeated less invitingly. "This is—"

"I know."

The voice was a man's, and he had to be drunk; it wasn't just blurred but inexplicably affectionate. "Excuse me, what number do you think you called?" Jack said.

"Yours, son. Yours and the lady's with the teenage boy."
-

"I guess there are a whole lot of families like that. Do you have a name?"

"For her?" Jack was awaiting some insult to identify the caller as deploring Leslie's presence in the house when the man said "Leslie Ames."

"Okay, that's right, this is her place." Nevertheless the man's tone—fond or sympathetic or both—had started to confuse Jack, who could only assume it was meant to be ironic. "Did you want to talk to her?"

"Just you, son. Couldn't be anyone else with her at work and him at school."

"Sure, so excuse me, who are you and what do you want?"

"Don't you know yet, son? Do you really not know?"

When a dull ache spread up Jack's arm, he realised his fist had clenched around the banister. "I don't, so if you'd like to cut the bullshit—"

"It's me, son. I'm alive. It's your father."

Jack's body was a burden he had to lower onto the stairs. As it sank he heard himself protest "I've no idea who you are."

"I understand, son. Take your time. It must be a bit of a surprise."

"Will you stop calling me son?" Jack bowed forward to prevent the taut cord from hauling the base of the phone off the table. "I can't imagine who you think you're speaking to, so maybe you should—"

"Don't be like that, John." All at once, despite the mushiness of some of its consonants, the voice was sharper and firmer. "I know it's you. I saw your picture in the paper. I wasn't sure at first, but I am now. It's you all right. I'm not mad."