The Dark Inside (10 page)

‘Come far then?’ he asked, slapping his left hand on his thigh to clean it, frightening the pigeons and making them skip.

‘A way.’

‘What’s your father doing?’

James smiled as he watched Webster inspecting every tree and peering into every bin. And then he realized the man was still waiting for an answer.

‘We’re looking for clues.’

‘Oh?’ The old man picked up his walking stick, which was leaning against the arm of the bench, and flicked away the nuggets of bread nearest to him with the rubber tip, aiming for
the pigeons.

‘Somebody attacked him and we’re trying to find out who.’

‘Attacked your father? Here, in this park?’

‘One night a few weeks ago.’

The old man tutted and shook his head as the pigeons pecked and cooed and bobbed.

‘Do you sit here a lot?’ James asked.

‘Yes. My wife and I used to come here every day. We’d talk for hours. Now it’s just me of course.’ The man cleared his throat before he went on. ‘I can’t say
I’ve seen anything that’ll help you.’

‘That’s OK.’

They sat in silence, watching people as they passed.

No one spoke to them.

Very few people even looked at them.

‘I feel like the Invisible Man,’ said James eventually and the old man nodded wistfully.

When Webster returned, he sat beside James on the flat, wooden arm of the bench.

‘Anything?’ James asked.

‘Not a button,’ said Webster, shaking his head.

‘I’m guessing it was a man who attacked you?’ asked the old man.

‘Of a sort, I suppose.’ And Webster glanced at James, wondering what he’d said.

‘It’ll come back around to them one day.’

Webster licked his lips. Wiped his brow with the back of his hand. ‘Is that how life works?’ he asked. ‘Somebody gets their comeuppance if they deserve it?’

‘I don’t know for sure, but I’d like to think so,’ the old man replied.

‘What if something bad happens that isn’t their fault?’

‘I couldn’t say. Why do you ask?’

‘No reason.’ Webster looked down at his lap and said nothing more.

‘No one really knows anything, do they?’ said James to fill the silence, and the old man laughed out loud and the pigeons rippled up into a cloud that glimmered with pinks and blues
and browns. He drummed the fingers of his left hand over the top of his walking stick then cleared his throat.

‘Where are you staying?’ he asked. Webster and James glanced at each other for an answer. ‘Because I have a house, which I rattle around in, if you’d like to stay. Until
you’ve found what you’re looking for.’

‘Are you sure?’ asked James.

‘If it’ll do some good then I’m all for it. I’m not sure there’s enough in the world just now. Or, if there is, I’m not seeing it.’ He held out his left
hand, turning it upside down for James to grasp and shake. ‘I’m Cook,’ he said.

Cook’s house was large and set halfway down a road of detached houses with semi-circle driveways and porches that lit up at night.

James lay in bed and listened to the night sounds in the walls and the ceiling. The bed sheets smelt musty. An old bloodstain on one of the white pillowcases had turned brown over time and
seemed to follow him wherever he laid his head. But he just accepted it because he was tired, and the mattress in the bed was soft and seemed to hold every atom of him perfectly.

Cook had been very welcoming. Grilling them steaks he had stored in the freezer. Offering them red wine and telling James to try it because life was too short not to. He showed
them pictures of his wife as they sat in the living room afterwards, drinking fresh coffee, and asked after their family.

‘We’re all there is,’ James had replied. Cook had nodded and then asked what line of work Webster was in, and James had told him he had been in the army, which had worn him
out, and Cook asked nothing more about it after that.

Webster said nothing the whole time.

Eventually, after speaking and growing easier with each other, the boy plucked up courage to ask about Cook’s useless right arm, and the droop in his face, and the old man told him he had
suffered a stroke the year before. It made life difficult, he said, but not impossible, and yet not always worth living. James smiled and said he understood what Cook meant.

Later, as James slept, he dreamt of his mother bustling round Cook’s house, tidying and cleaning until the surfaces in the kitchen shone and the fitted carpets were
sucked clean and bright, and the dust on the mantelpiece in the living room was gone.

When he awoke, it was still night. The moon was almost full and shone through the four panes of glass in the window, printing the ghost of a white kite below it on the bedroom floor. It was
difficult to fall back to sleep in a strange house. So James lay there, trying to piece together fragments from his dreaming.

He sat up when he heard someone walking along the landing.

When the footsteps stopped, James listened for a while longer and then got out of bed and opened the door. Webster was perched on the window sill near the top of the stairs, wrapped in a white
sheet. He was looking up at the moon. James sat quietly beside him and asked if he was all right.

Webster nodded.

‘I thought I heard somebody outside the house, but I didn’t see anyone and then I found myself sitting here.’

James stared out of the window at the dark garden below, running his fingers over the faint bobble of scars on his face. The ointment had worked as quickly on him as it had on Webster. But he
had given up trying to understand how.

‘What’ll we do if they find us again?’ he asked Webster.

The man said nothing, just wrapped the sheet tighter round him and licked his lips. In the silence they heard Cook starting to snore.

‘We should tell him,’ said James.

‘Or we could just leave.’

James shook his head. ‘Cook’s lonely. We’re doing some good.’

‘And he’s doing some too, isn’t he? So we can’t leave, can we?’

‘No. We can’t’

Webster rubbed his eyes. ‘Let’s sleep on it. Decide in the morning.’

‘I’m glad you said that.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I didn’t want all this to be a dream and wake up and find myself back in Timpston.’

‘You don’t ever want to go back, do you?’

‘No.’

‘Because your stepfather’s there?’

James nodded. ‘If I had to go back, I wouldn’t know what to do.’

‘To make things better, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘Maybe you can’t.’

James thought about that. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t think I can. I reckon I’d have more chance of making it up there.’ And he pointed through the window at the
moon.

Later that night, Cook awoke with a start. He was not surprised. He barely slept well now, not since the clot in his brain had stuck and rewired him into a different, more
decrepit version of himself. He lay staring up at the ceiling. Usually, he felt lonely in the middle of the night when the whole world was asleep. But now, for the first time in a long while, he
was not alone.

A noise sent his thoughts skittering away into the dark. He heard it again. The sound of somebody crying out.

Cook levered himself out of bed, and padded to his bedroom door and opened it, following the sound until he came to Webster’s door. His hand hovered above the handle as he wondered whether
to look in or not.

When he heard another door clicking open, he looked up and saw the boy peering out from the dark of his bedroom.

‘It’s the war,’ said James quietly as he tiptoed on to the landing. ‘It’s all locked up in there.’ He tapped the side of his head.

Webster cried out again. Words burbled into one another.

‘Will he settle?’ asked Cook and James nodded. ‘War does terrible things to people. Turns them into somebody different.’

‘Like a stroke can?’

‘Yes,’ said Cook. ‘In a way. The same as grief can too.’ And when he looked down at the floor James knew not to ask anything more.

Gradually, the cries ceased. James and Cook stood like sentinels guarding the door until the silence began to hum.

‘He’ll be OK now,’ said James. So Cook nodded and returned to his bedroom after whispering goodnight.

Back in bed, James lay thinking about what Cook had said. About how Webster might have been turned into somebody else because of the war and how different he might have been
before then, before they had ever met. And James wondered if he could ever help change him back.

Eventually, he clicked on the bedside light and took out the notes from the back pocket of his jeans, which were hanging over the back of a chair, and read a section over and over. Throughout
history there had been some people who had truly believed in the ability of men or women to shape-shift into terrible creatures on the night of a full moon, but there were far more who had
proclaimed it to have been a delusion of those diagnosed as mad or sad or troubled.

No one knew the truth for sure.

After James had finished reading, he slipped the notes back into the pocket of his jeans and turned out the light. The dark held him gently in the palm of its hand. Yet he could not sleep. His
mind kept turning over what he knew to be real about the world and what was not. And the more he mulled it over, the less sure he became of anything at all. In the end he tried telling himself that
whatever he thought did not matter in the slightest.

But, deep down, he knew it did.

When Cook picked up the newspaper, from beneath the letter box at the base of the front door, he saw James’s picture on the front page. Webster was standing back down the
hallway, watching him, the morning sunshine beaming off his black hair. The old man laid the paper flat on the dresser by the door and scanned it. When he sensed someone watching him, he looked
up.

‘The boy’s here of his own free will,’ said Webster. ‘He’s got no one else.’

Cook tapped the newspaper.

‘Says he’s got a stepfather worried sick.’

‘He beats him.’

‘So you’re his saviour?’

‘And he’s mine. Same as we’re yours.’

Cook smiled at that.

James appeared at the top of the stairs and powered down them. He stopped when he saw the newspaper lying on the dresser. Both men were staring at him.

‘Someone’ll notice you eventually,’ said Cook. ‘And then there’ll be trouble.’

‘No one has yet,’ James said.

‘They will around here. It’s that sort of place.’

‘Do you want us to leave?’ asked James.

‘That’s up to you.’

Webster and James looked at each other and something passed between them.

‘We’ll stay,’ said Webster. ‘For another day. We’ll need to leave then anyway, even if we don’t find who we’re looking for.’

‘Why?’ asked Cook.

‘Because then it’ll be out of our hands.’

When Cook looked at James to ask why, the boy just turned away, saying nothing.

They decided James should stay with Cook while Webster went back to the park to look around again for clues. As they drank tea, Cook described how he had been divorced early on
in his life, but then found his real love second time around.

‘Luck, I used to call it,’ he said. ‘Fate, she used to say. I don’t mind telling you, if there’s a plan for each of us, I reckon I got a better one than most.
I’m not sure what I did to deserve it. Maybe
that
was luck.’ And he chuckled.

James told Cook stories about school.

They avoided the real questions weighing inside them. And they knew it. But that was how it was.

After a few moments of silence staring into the brown dregs in the bottom of the teacups, Cook slapped his thigh and asked if James would like to see his garden, and the boy nodded. Both of them
were glad for the chance to have something else to talk about.

The garden shone. It moved and lived around them as they walked down the green, striped lawn. Cook used his walking stick to point out the various trees and shrubs his wife had planted, at the
shapes she had sculpted using flower beds and borders. And James began to imagine what sort of person she might have been.

They followed the sound of running water and stood by a shallow stream flowing down the left-hand side of the garden. Green weed like streamers. Flat stones silvered with bubbles. Cook leant on
his stick and grinned at the tiny fish hovering, gulping water over their gills.

James could tell he was proud of the garden and even prouder of his wife.

‘It’s lovely,’ he said and Cook beamed.

‘All I can do is to try and keep it ticking over the way she would have wanted.’

‘To remember her by?’

Cook nodded.

‘She used to spend all her time out here. She would say all the clues you ever needed were here.’

‘Clues? About what?’

Cook smiled. He beckoned James over to a flower with red petals and a black cushion of a centre. And then he told him to crouch down and look the flower full in the face.

‘Can you see what she meant?’

James stared. Squinted. Half nodded. ‘Maybe . . .’ And then he shook his head. ‘No. I’m not sure what you mean.’

‘You will. When you’re ready. Just like I did.’