The Shut Eye (31 page)

James gripped the door with both hands, braced his right foot against the wall and leaned perilously backwards.

Slowly, slowly, the door edged open.

The child was sitting on the bed, cross-legged and wearing a helmet with a tinted visor, as if waiting to be launched into space.

‘Daddy!’ he shouted, and held out his arms.

‘DADDY!’

Daniel Buck ran across the fresh cement with a drawing in his hand – two goldfish in a pond – to show Daddy.

Ang shouted at him and Daniel looked up, and then down at the wet, sticky greyness under his feet. It wasn’t his fault! He had run across the forecourt a hundred times to see Daddy and it had never been like this!

He twisted away and jumped clear of the cement.

But Ang was angry. He ran and grabbed Daniel’s arm and pulled him roughly into the garage – all the while being angry in words Daniel couldn’t understand, but which he knew meant he’d done something very naughty.

‘You bad!’ Ang told him. ‘You bad. Brian angry. You daddy angry.’

Then he shouted above the noise of the cement mixer, ‘James!
James!
’

But James wasn’t there and Daniel started to cry. He wanted Daddy, but he also didn’t want Daddy to be there if he was angry with him. He didn’t know
what
he wanted, except to go home.

‘Ssssh!’ Ang said. ‘
Ssssh!
’

He jerked Daniel’s arm and the goldfish picture tore across one corner.

‘Ang bad!’ cried Daniel, and the verdict rang off the wide workshop walls.
Ang bad!

‘
Ssssh!
’

More yanking of his arm, and then the ground disappeared below Daniel’s feet and he squealed in fear as he dangled like a doll in the air, and then he touched ground again, down low, in a big square hole, and then Ang jumped in beside him and opened a secret door to a tiny room with waxen black walls.

‘Not cry!’ Ang told him so fiercely that he stopped. ‘Be good! Not cry! Go home!’

Then he left him there and shut the door.

He shut the door.

Daniel wanted to go home. He wanted Daddy not to be angry any more and he wanted Mummy to hug him.

So he tried his best to be good. He said please when he wanted a toy or more paper to draw on, and t
hank you
for the fish fingers and the apples and the milk, even when it tasted funny. When Ang came home from work every night, just like Daddy used to do, they played with old toys he recognized from TiggerTime, or the new wire ones Ang made for him. Cars and animals. When he was alone, he wore the crash helmet and played racing drivers on the bed.

And all the time, he tried to be good and he tried to be quiet.

‘When can I go home?’ he asked every day.

‘Soon,’ said Ang. ‘Be good. Be quiet. Go home …’

Home,

home,

home.

The cement was ruined

and he’d get the blame.

And Daniel had started to cry.

He’d held him too hard,

and there would be bruises.

He’d torn his picture.

Ang bad! Ang bad!

He’d put him in the room,

just until he calmed down.

And when he stopped crying,

he’d let him go.

In a minute.

An hour.

A day, a week, a month.

Home,

home,

home.

Each time he meant it. Each time he lied.

Because of the shame.

Daniel could never go home.

He would tell them about the room in the pit,

and they would know everything …

Too hard.

Too horrible.

Ang could never go home.

And when Immigration finally came for him, there was only one way to hide his shame

for ever.

Blue Circle.

Ang turned a final somersault and landed on the spikes.

The post-mortem would show that death was instantaneous.

But that was just his lucky body.

For as he shuddered on the iron palings, Ang Nu – who was not a grown man, and never would be – knew that nothing could be hidden from the waiting ancestors.

And that the greatest shame of all was yet to come.

JAMES WADED SLOWLY
from the dark little room with his son in his arms. His eyes sought out Anna, kneeling at the edge of the pit.

I found him!
he said in his head.
We found him!
But his throat was too clogged with exertion and emotion to make words.

Instead he raised his son up and gave him back to his mother, who said, ‘
Daniel
,’ so soft and unsurprised that he might have been gone for five minutes, not a lifetime. She tipped back the helmet and stared in mute wonder at her son’s new face.

As he stood there, knee-deep in burning concrete, with his arms still raised and as stone as a statue, James Buck heard the door in his head click gently closed behind them all.

MARVEL GOT THERE
as an ambulance pulled away.

There was a cement truck on the forecourt, and a thick pipe running from it through the front doors. A man in fishing waders was rolling a broad hosepipe on to a reel, and a sopping wet Anna Buck stood nearby, holding a child who was really too big to be carried.

Marvel splashed through the streams of grey water running across the forecourt.

‘Where is she?’ he shouted at Anna. ‘Is she in there?’

He didn’t wait for an answer but ran past them all into the garage.

The concrete in the bottom of the pit was a few feet deep.

The door to the tool room stood ajar – held open by the grey sea.

Marvel started down the ladder.

‘Oi!’ The man in the waders was striding towards him. ‘You go in there and I’ll call the police!’

‘I
am
the police,’ said Marvel. ‘What happened here?’

‘Christ knows,’ said the man. ‘All
I
know is, I’m doing my job, as requested, and this bloke jumps in the pit and opens the door and finds a bloody
kid
in there!

‘Edie? A girl?’

‘Nah, a boy. He’s outside.’

‘Fuck!’ said Marvel. ‘I have to search that room.’

‘Oh no you don’t,’ said the man. ‘Already got one bloke gone to hospital with alkali burns, and Health and Safety on their way to kick my arse.’

‘There’s somebody else in that room,’ said Marvel. ‘Give me your waders.’

The cement was drying fast, but Marvel still left a trail of footprints to the open door.

A couple of times he hit a softer spot and his foot went in up to the shin, but the waders were slick and not too hard to tug free.

He had to turn sideways and duck his head to get through the shortened doorway, and when he turned to face the room he felt every hair on his body stand on end.

‘My God,’ he said. ‘
My God
.’

The fresh concrete had made the ceiling so low that his head almost touched it, and had covered anything that might have been on the floor. All that was left was the strip light overhead and the walls, which were solid blue-black.

Except in one place, where a window opened on to another world.

Even through a veil of bitty black, Marvel could see the curve of the lawn, the coloured-in flowers, the trees at the bottom of the garden.

The view from Edie Evans’s bedroom window.

And on the sill, the bicycle bell, somehow revealed.

Marvel held his breath and touched the bell. It felt greasy under his fingertips.

Just as he had done to the pictures he’d found in the skip, Marvel reached out and scratched at the black wax near the window, and watched the colours emerge magically under his nails.

He was a child again, his past overlapping his future here, in this moment.

It
was
all circles.

Marvel pulled off the waders and walked out of the garage and on to Northborough Road.

Numb.

A lost boy found. A dramatic rescue. There should have been mayhem outside. There should have been fire trucks and ambulances and police cars parked from here to the bridge. There should have been TV crews and flapping tape and top brass arriving to take credit for all the stuff they hadn’t done.

Marvel would have called them all, except he wouldn’t have known what to tell them.

He didn’t know what to tell himself.

Anna Buck had disappeared, so all there was to show for the drama was the driver smoking a fretful cigarette next to his lorry.

Blue Circle.

Marvel was too dazed to think about whether or not he believed in coincidences any more. He was too dazed to think about anything; he just stood there on the garage forecourt, while commuters split around him. People walked fast, with their heads down, their ears plugged with white cables; a woman in turquoise lycra jogged slowly past; a man walked two Dachshunds, and children on bicycles wove their way between the pedestrians, cheeks rosy and hair ruffled by the sharp wind.

Marvel didn’t know what to do or where to go. Something had ended, but it was as though he was the only one who had seen it pass.

‘You’re standing on the feet.’

‘Hmm?’

A small girl with brown pigtails glared up at him through thick glasses.

‘You’re standing on the feet.’ She pointed at the ground and he looked down to see he was standing on one of five small footprints made in the cement. He stepped off it and said ‘Sorry,’ and the child said ‘That’s OK,’ and walked away.

As she did, he noticed that the clips in her plaits were shaped like little stars.

WHEN ANNA BUCK
opened the door of the flat, Marvel already had his shoes in his hand.

‘She isn’t there,’ he said, and burst into tears.

She led him upstairs and made him some tea.

Marvel couldn’t remember the last time he had cried. He hadn’t cried in front of anybody since he’d fallen off a swing when he was six. Now he wept like a child, while an even smaller boy with straggly blond hair and dirty fingernails worked his way through slices of toast, dripping with butter, at the opposite side of the kitchen table.

Anna sipped her own tea and kept touching the boy’s head, kept leaning in to smell him, kiss him, hug him.

‘This is Daniel,’ she said huskily, when Marvel finally stopped weeping.

Marvel had so many questions that he didn’t know what to say, so he just said ‘Hello,’ but the boy only fixed him with steady blue eyes.

The three of them sat there making small sounds. Daniel chewing. Anna sipping. Marvel sniffing now and then.

‘Have you called DCI Lloyd?’ he finally asked.

‘Not yet,’ said Anna.

‘You need to call him,’ he said.

‘I will,’ she said. ‘There’s plenty of time.’

Marvel knew that, for Anna, there was.

Plenty of time.

A great calm seemed to have descended on her.

There was no rush. Not any more. No rush to call the police; no rush to find out what had happened; no rush to do anything but touch her son and feed him round after round of hot buttered toast.

That all started to seem very sensible to Marvel.

All very sane.

He clung to the sanity; it was a nice change.

He wondered whether the blue circles were still on the bedroom wall, and that made him think of the day when Anna Buck had told him that sometimes she heard Daniel crying.

That seemed logical now too. Everything could be explained away if you just thought logically.

‘You must have heard him crying through the floor,’ he said.

‘Maybe,’ said Anna.

‘Subconsciously, maybe you knew he was there all along.’

‘Maybe.’

She was humouring him. She didn’t believe that for a second, and neither did he. Everything could be explained, but that didn’t mean it made sense.

Anna sipped her tea and stroked her son.

He hesitated, then told her, ‘The window was on the wall, just the way you saw it.’

She nodded, and Marvel looked at Daniel’s buttery hands. He could see that the dirt under every ragged nail was made of blue-black wax, like his own were now.

He stared into the bottom of his mug. ‘But the cement had covered everything else. If she was in there …’ He trailed off and shrugged.

‘Was there a girl the little room with you, Daniel?’ said Anna gently.

The boy shook his head and went on chewing.

‘Never?’ said Marvel.

Daniel shook his head again.

‘What I don’t understand …’ Marvel started, then stopped because there was so much he didn’t understand that he should really try to put it in some sort of order.

‘If she showed you all those things, Anna. If she left all those clues so you could find her …’

Anna nodded.

‘Then where
is
she?’ he said.

Anna stroked Daniel’s hair and shook her head sadly. ‘I don’t know,’ she sighed. ‘We found Daniel. That’s all I know for sure. Daniel is home.’

Then she hugged Daniel so hard that he squirmed.

Marvel phoned for a cab.

‘We must go too,’ said Anna. ‘Go and get you checked out and see Daddy in the hospital, mustn’t we?’

Daniel nodded soberly.

‘Is James OK?’ asked Marvel.

‘He has burns on his legs, but the driver got a lot of water on him really fast and apparently water’s important …’

She stopped, then shrugged.

‘Yes,’ said Marvel. ‘Yes.’

Even though it was out of his way, Marvel got his cab to drop them both off at the hospital.

Anna held Daniel’s hand tight as she got out, then turned and thanked him.

And although he was suspended, Marvel offered to tell DCI Lloyd that Daniel had been found.

‘I’ll do it,’ she assured him. ‘I promise I will, but …’ She looked at Daniel, then went on, ‘I just want a couple of days first. Being a family. Being normal. Being sane.’

Marvel hesitated, then nodded. ‘I suppose it’ll wait a couple of days,’ he said. ‘The important thing is that you have your son back.’

She smiled. ‘I know. Thank you.’

Then she leaned into the cab and kissed his cheek.

IT WAS THE
first nice day of summer and Superintendent Clyde had foolishly opened his window. The fumes of fatted lamb gambolled up from the Happy Kebabby and made Marvel’s stomach roll.