Silent Children (45 page)

Jack was unable to silence his response. "She won't care if she never sees me again, sure enough."

"Couldn't have been worth having then, could she? I expect she's only interested in people she can look after, like your mother is. Anyway, let's talk when we're on our way, shall we? We'll have lots of news to tell each other," Jack's father said, and took hold of the arms of the chair.

"Don't try it. I told you, don't move."

"Who do you think you are, speaking like that to your father?

You've read too many of the kind of books you write." When that had no effect he pulled his lower lip down with a forefinger and gave Jack a knowing look. "If you hang on much longer the police are going to be here and then I'll have to tell them what you used to do."

Jack's memory sharpened and came absolutely clear. "I hope you will," he said.

"You're admitting it at last, are you?"

"I'm seeing the truth if that's what you mean. You know I never realised what you were making me do. You'd never have been able to make me if I had."

"That's what you'd love to believe, you mean." He searched Jack's eyes as if to convince them or himself that they were hiding some unsureness, and then his mouth drooped further open as he scowled at the knife. "I notice you didn't tell your lady friend what you want that for."

"Whatever has to be done."

"You're no different from me then, are you? You just wish you were. What are you going to tell everyone about me? Going to try and turn me into one of your horrors? Maybe you think I'm something you made up."

"I know you aren't." It was as much as Jack could produce in the way of sympathy to add "I know some of why you're how you are."

"You don't know the half of it. If you knew everything you'd save me if you care at all for your own flesh and blood."

"I'll say what I can when I'm asked to."

"It won't be enough. Listen, I know what we can do. Let's go for a drive while I tell you the rest of it and if it doesn't change your mind you can bring me straight back."

"No need. We're here. You can tell them yourself whatever you want them to know."

"They won't understand, can't you see that? They won't like you ought to, and it won't be only them. Don't you know how the villains would be after me in prison if they heard I'd done something to kids? They have to find someone they can reckon is lower than them. You wouldn't want to think of that happening to your own father, John."

That was true, especially given how aged and exhausted he looked. Jack's grasp slackened on the knife until he saw his father pretending not to notice. "There's a lot I don't want to think of about you," he said. "If you manage to persuade them you had enough excuses maybe they'll just put you away somewhere you can't harm anyone else."

"I can't now, John. Take a good look at me and tell me if you think I could."

"That's why you're dangerous, because someone might think you aren't."

"Are you still fretting about those kids next door even though they're going to be fine? They're the last. I'd have no more opportunities. I'd just want to keep myself to myself." He risked letting Jack see his hopefulness, and when all this failed to make a difference he said resentfully "I wouldn't have bothered with her except she was upset, and then he wandered in and got me all confused."

"Are you through yet? You've said a lot more than too much, and it's making me feel kind of sick."

"Won't it be good for your book, me talking to you? I'd like to think I helped." He started a laugh that didn't get far, then attempted a grin that sagged with disgust. "I know why you feel sick, it's the stink in here. You get that round kids. You wouldn't know, never having had to deal with them. Let's go and sit somewhere you'll feel better."

"I can put up with it where I am."

"Is there nothing that'll move you, John?" his father complained, glaring at him with eyes that looked ready to weep. That wasn't about to affect Jack, who met his gaze, vowing not to blink before his father did. His eyes were beginning to sting, and he was gripping the knife harder and telling himself it couldn't matter less who blinked first—he would rather lose the contest than appear close to tears—when he heard the whoop of a siren behind him.

It sounded near—perhaps at the end of the street. When he glanced over his shoulder, however, Jericho Close was deserted. He turned back to the room and found his father standing over him. "Last laugh, John," his father said.

He closed his clammy hands around Jack's on the knife and leaned his face toward him, grinning so gleefully his gums dripped. Jack's nostrils filled with smells of cloth and breath and unwashed flesh that merged into a choking staleness. As he tried to heave himself out of the trap of the chair and drag his hands free, his father's grin collapsed into a grimace at Jack's attempts to escape him, or at the situation where they'd ended up, or at himself. "Like horror, do you? I'll show you some horror," he muttered into Jack's face, and jerked the knife upward as he ducked and brought the underside of his chin down hard.

Jack felt the knife snag and cut through the obstruction. He saw his father's tongue flinch as the point of the blade found it from beneath. His father's mouth gaped in a silent cry and fought to raise its shaky ends into a smile as he reared up so violently the handle was wrenched from Jack's grasp. "Tell me to shut up," his father mumbled, his eyes wincing as his tongue caught on the knife. "Let's have some peace at last." He fell back with a flurry of pink fish into the chair he'd vacated, and the impact drove the blade through his tongue, which turned crimson in his gaping mouth. His eyes clouded, but he peered past Jack through the window. An ambulance had swung into Jericho Close.

He stared at Jack and managed to shake his head an inch from side to side, and again. In case that failed to make his wishes sufficiently clear, he used his reddened hands to haul at the knife, almost splitting his tongue in half. Jack had to turn away from the spectacle of the blade wagging like some kind of silent joke in the wound of a mouth. Leslie was helping Ian and Charlotte down her path as the attendants came to meet them.

The children were in the ambulance, and she was about to climb into it, when she glanced in Jack's direction. His hand lifted itself before he knew what it meant to communicate, and then he did. He mustn't delay any treatment the children might need, and he needn't imagine how the sight of his father's condition could affect them in their present state, but perhaps these were reasons he was giving himself not to acknowledge how he didn't want to be responsible for prolonging his father's life. How would that benefit anyone? He showed Leslie his open palm and waved her away, and glimpsed the beginning of a puzzled frown as she followed the children into the ambulance. He watched the vehicle leave Jericho Close before he turned to face his father.

He wasn't quite dead. His chin was leaning on the handle that was propped against his collarbone while he gazed at a photograph album in his lap. Jack couldn't distinguish the photographs for the red fingerprints on them, but he guessed what they were, and when he heard the sounds his father's mouth was producing along with a great deal of blood—a bubbling murmur that Jack was just able to hear had the tune of a lullaby—he wanted to snatch the album out of his father's clutches. Instead he sat back with some weariness and waited. Soon the vague humming lost its hold on the melody and subsided into a gurgle, and the album slipped from the limp fingers, and the eyes grew dull as pebbles above the slack, raw, disappointed grimace that had helped the pink and yellow dress acquire a crimson bib.

Jack leaned forward to close the eyes. Apart from a shudder when the lids proved reluctant to descend over the swollen eyeballs, which felt rather too firm to be lifeless, he experienced only relief. Before long even that gave way to a crushing sense that he had nothing left to do, since the police would want him to leave the scene untouched. The few minutes it took them to arrive felt to him more like an entire sleepless night. He went to the front door as two uniformed officers strode up the path. Curtains were stirring at several bedroom windows in Jericho Close. "He's in here," Jack said, loud enough for whoever was watching to hear. "Hector Woollie. I'm his son."

Ian had never met anyone at a restaurant before, but since the girl who showed him to a table seemed not much older than him and less dressed he didn't mind. She handed him a menu bigger than the table and shouted "I'll be back" as though she were quoting one of the films for which there were posters all over the walls and pillars of the huge crowded high-ceilinged room. She hadn't returned when a neighbouring foursome—noisy even by the standards of the restaurant, presumably as a result of all the bottles of beer they'd lined up like trophies—was joined by a friend. Like them, he was in his twenties and in black—boots, jeans, T-shirt, cap on backwards—though their resemblance to an American street gang stopped short of their accents. He slouched over and took hold of the chair opposite Ian with the hand that was empty of a Budweiser. "Anyone using this, mate?"

"They will be in a minute."

It seemed that mightn't be enough to dissuade the thin-faced customer, who wore a grin meant to announce that nothing had better upset him, from commandeering the chair, but then the waitress came swiftly back. "Get us a chair over here, love," the man said.

"I'll be with you when I've looked after him." To Ian she said "Can I bring you anything till your friend comes? Something to drink?"

Ian was tempted to try for a beer or to call her Sophie after her name-tag, not least since the black-capped five were watching. Instead he asked and felt childish for asking "Can I have a Zingo?"

"Course you can." She flashed him a smile that could have advertised toothpaste and was on her way again before the standing man had a chance to yell "What happened to my chair, love?"

"I'll see what we can fix you up with," she called, not as loud but more distinctly, and consulted with a waiter as she dodged around him.

The man returned to his friends and made a comment with her name in it that raised a raucous laugh. They better hadn't give her a hard time when she'd been so friendly with Ian—he'd faced worse than them. They hadn't noticed his disapproval by the time their mirth subsided, and he began to feel rather at a loss, even in danger of learning that he'd been the victim of a change of mind. The only person to approach him in the next five minutes was Sophie, bearing his Zingo in a tall glass on a tray. "Want to order now, or are you saving yourself?" she said.

"Okay if I wait another five?"

"Just call me when you want me. Your date won't stand you up if they've any sense."

The compliment turned his face not entirely unpleasantly hot, and he was trying to think of a suitable response, too late for this time but designed to greet her next appearance, when the man with no chair shouted "Where's my seat, love?"

"Somebody's working on it."

"Fucking building it, more like."

Either she didn't hear or object to his language or decided nobody else would for the uproar. As she headed for the kitchen yet again he stalked across to Ian's table and seized the unoccupied chair. "I'm having this, all right," he declared.

"You can't. I'm keeping it for someone."

"So you can tell them I got to it first, can't you, mate."

Ian was about to argue when a voice cut through the hubbub. "That'll be mine, I guess."

"Hey, Jack."

The man in the cap didn't move as Jack gave Ian a quick handshake and stretched out a hand for the chair, but then the waiter Sophie had approached brought a stool from the bar. "Can you make do with this, sir, till you and your party are ready to eat?"

The man took the stool and pointed at Jack with its legs. "You look like you think you're somebody."

"I've tried to be."

The man perched above his cronies and drew sniggers from them with a comment, while Jack ordered a Miller and a burger and Ian made his twice the burger. "So," Jack said to him with a tentativeness that went with his expression, then raised his eyebrows and the corners of his mouth. "How's everyone?"

"Who?"

"You, for instance."

"Okay."

"Back at school, yes? How's that now?"

"It's school."

"But you're doing how well at it? Well?"

"I guess. They like some of the stuff I've written. Shit, I was going to show you a story I wrote, but I've left it at home."

"What was it about?"

"Mostly Charlotte. How she is really, not like the story I had the fight over. That was crap. Maybe this one's a bit less crap."

"You're starting to sound like a writer, so keep writing. How is Charlotte?"

"She isn't such a pain now she's older. I go there every week. My dad likes me to since she said it wasn't my fault she ran away, only I don't think Hilene likes me there too much. She puts up with it because she doesn't want to upset Charlotte. Christ, you know what my dad told me Charlotte said? She wants to marry me when she grows up."

"She'll be someone else by then. Anyway, there are worse things than being wanted." Jack seemed to welcome Sophie's reappearance, either just the interruption or his drink as well. He took a swig before saying "She's over the worst, then."

"She had to take stuff to help her sleep. I think maybe she still does." Ian felt suddenly restless with guilt, not least because he'd brought away no nightmares from being trapped by Jack's father, only dreams every night as he was falling asleep of all the chances he ought to have taken to save Charlotte. "Did you see what the wheelie woman put about us in the paper?" he said.

"I saw a lot of papers. Saw a bunch of reporters first, same as I expect you did. What did that one say?"

"Said we were all heroes of twin houses of horror," Ian told him, mocking the headline as much as he could.

"I did see that. It ought to have meant you and Charlotte. I hope it impressed your neighbours at least."

"They've been okay with us, most of them have. I think some of them don't know what's true, or maybe they don't want to know. Tell you who thinks now she was wrong about me—my gran. You know, my mum's mother."