Voices in the Dark (12 page)

‘Real gold leaf, not one word of a lie. The beggars came out and collected it afterwards. Come on.’

Jasmine linked her arm in my mother’s. She had to reach
a long way up to do it, but it made them very alike. The weak sunlight in their brown hair was a thousand colours. My mother drew strangers’ eyes as the north draws a compass, and Jasmine at almost seven years old was already beautiful. It only made me lonelier today. Nothing was right now that Michael had gone. It seemed like the worst kind of sign.

As we passed by the Royal Gardens, Jasmine ran to the railings to stare through at the boarded house. The place looked more dismal in the daylight. The dark surrounded it and gave it stature, but now it was just a derelict building, with the light shining through the gaps in the roof and all the windows smashed. It seemed already a hundred years since Michael and I had sat in the abandoned carriage with the wind howling around us.

‘Mama, did you ever go to that house in the old days?’ said Jasmine.

‘No,’ said my mother.

‘Whose house was it?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘It must have been someone’s.’

‘Oh, Jas, it was a long time ago. But, yes, it must have been someone’s.’

We walked the rest of the way in silence. By the time we got back to Trader’s Row, the street was in shadow, and starlings were wheeling in the sky. ‘It will be autumn before long,’ said my mother, glancing up.

‘Mama?’ said Jasmine. ‘Can I please not go to school any more?’

‘Why do you say that?’ said my mother, looking down at her anxiously.

‘I just don’t like it there. I don’t want to go back.’

‘You have to go to school, Jas,’ said my mother. ‘You want to learn and get clever, don’t you?’

Jasmine sighed. ‘When do I have to go?’

‘Next week.’

‘I want to go and train with a great one, like Uncle did. Can I?’

‘Maybe one day.’

‘That means no, doesn’t it?’ She tugged my mother’s hand. ‘Doesn’t it?’

My mother rubbed her forehead. Her face was very serious tonight; the laugh that usually lingered at the corners of her mouth was quite gone.

‘Come on, Jas,’ I said. ‘Mama is tired.’ I took Jasmine’s hand, and we followed her inside.

Leo was writing when we came in, resting on the accounts book. He looked up as the door opened, then closed the book and put it into the drawer under the counter. We sat in the back room and drank tea while the storm rose again in the city. ‘Anselm,’ Leo said when we had finished. ‘Will you help me sand down these old cupboards? I want to start varnishing them before the cold weather sets in.’

It was something to do, and I set myself to it fiercely. I took the oil lamp out to the yard and worked in its circle of light. I thought Michael must be thirty miles away by now, if they had met no problems on the road. The wind troubled the lamp and made its light stretch and waver. I worked for hours, until it was quite dark. I glanced up only when my mother called me for dinner. And as I looked up, I started. Someone had been standing by the yard gate looking in at me.

As soon as I met his eyes, he turned and vanished. I
could not be sure how long he had been there. Fear caught hold of me suddenly. I picked up the lamp and went inside.

‘What is it?’ said my mother as I closed the door behind me.

‘Nothing.’

‘You look as if you’ve seen a spirit.’

‘Not a spirit,’ I said. ‘It’s nothing.’

‘Dinner is ready.’

I nodded and set down the lamp. But my heart was still beating fast. I kept glancing at the front window, expecting to see someone looking in at us. And even after everyone else had gone to bed, I could not sleep. I went down to the shop and polished a box of old lamps at the counter instead. The wind growled disconsolately around the house and made me think of the shop next door standing empty and Michael further away now – forty miles or fifty, and getting further with each minute that passed.

At half past one, I heard people shouting outside. They had been shouting for several minutes, but I had not heard them at first, because the wind and my thoughts had drowned their voices. I glanced up at the front window. The lamplight made reflections against the glass, and beyond it figures were moving with lighted torches. Through the grilles, I could see people dressed in blue, half of them boys my age and others older, running up and down the street. They were shouting, ‘The king is dead!’ and rattling the grilles on the shops.

‘Anselm!’ said Leo, making me start. He was standing on the stairs with his clothes pulled on hastily. ‘What is it?’ he said.

‘I don’t know. It’s a group of men in blue clothes.’

‘Blue clothes? Put out the lamp.’

I turned to blow it out. The scene outside the window emerged from the darkness. Eight or ten men were running up and down in the street, proclaiming that the king was dead. ‘Where are the police?’ said Leo. ‘Where the hell are they?’

Lights were coming on in the shops now. The starlings leaped from the tree opposite the Barones’ shop, rising in a cloud past the castle.

‘Join our cause!’ shouted one of the men. ‘Come out of your houses and join our cause!’

‘Piss off and let me sleep!’ called someone from the pharmacist’s highest window. The men threw themselves against the grille of her shop, their torches leaping wildly. I thought I recognized one of them for a second. He looked like Isaiah, from the class above mine at school. Then the light fell again, and I could not make him out.

‘Where are the police?’ Leo kept saying. Someone thumped the grille on our window, and we both started and drew back. My mother was on the stairs then, with her arm around Jasmine’s shoulders.

‘Come back upstairs,’ she whispered.

‘Maria, listen!’ Leo whispered. ‘Listen to them!’

‘Come back to bed. They will not do anything.’

‘You three go back,’ he said. ‘I’ll stay here.’

But none of us moved. It was half an hour before the police came and read the riot notice outside our door. ‘The king is not dead,’ they shouted; then, ‘By order of the government of Malonia and His Majesty King Cassius, disperse and return to your homes. You are charged with disturbing the peace, an offence punishable under Malonian civil law. Disperse and return to your homes. This is your first official warning.’

The men went on shouting and running. The crowd had multiplied; there must have been twenty or thirty of them now. Then, without warning, there was a volley of gunshots. Jasmine shrieked and clapped her hands to her ears. The police were firing rifles off their shoulders.

‘It’s all right,’ said my mother. ‘Shh, it’s all right.’ The gunshots came again, and the crowd broke up.

‘None of you are safe!’ shouted the nearest man as the crowd fled down an alley. ‘None of you royalists are safe in this city any more! Remember that!’

The silence hummed. Somewhere down the street, two traders were calling to each other from their upstairs windows: ‘Bloody nerve’ and ‘Get back to sleep; the police will sort it out.’ A man opened a window and threw out a cigarette, lazily, as if to show he was not afraid.

‘Come back upstairs,’ said my mother. ‘All of you. Come on.’

We went to bed, but I could tell no one else was sleeping. Eventually I got up again. Leo was there in the living room, smoking and staring out the narrow window at the roofs beyond. The whole city had a strangely subdued air now, like the atmosphere after a party. ‘Are you all right?’ I said.

He nodded and stubbed the cigarette out on the windowsill. ‘Things are changing,’ he said. ‘Aren’t they?’

‘I don’t know.’

He did not go on. I sat down on the sofa and stared into the dwindling fire. After a while, Leo stirred and crossed the room and sat down in Grandmother Margaret’s old rocking chair. There was no space in the tiny living room, and it stood jammed against the wall, where it could not move. He leaned forward and lit another cigarette. ‘There is something
I want to know,’ he said. ‘Why do they always choose our shop?’

My skin felt cold, as if the fire gave no heat at all. ‘Do you think they really do?’ I said.

‘The windows,’ he said. ‘And shouting about royalists. It can’t just be chance.’

And the man standing in the shadows, I thought. He was watching us for some reason.

‘They know our name is North,’ said Leo. ‘They must know that this is a royalist family. They must. Either that or …’

‘Or what?’

He sucked in smoke as if it was the only thing sustaining him. ‘I don’t know. Nothing. I was thinking about something else.’

The silence came between us again. I wanted to say something, but I didn’t. His hands were shaking.

‘Listen, Anselm,’ he said. ‘I’m thinking about going somewhere else for a while.’

‘Where can we go?’

‘Not you three. Just me.’

There was a silence. I let it draw out on purpose, to force him to speak.

‘You three could move to another apartment,’ he said. ‘I’ll sell the contents of the shop at the auction rooms, and it will be enough to live on for a long time. A long enough time. And …’

‘But where would you go? Papa, what are you even talking about?’

He studied the cigarette in his hand, as though he didn’t know how it had got there. The wind in the chimney sounded like a crying child. ‘Mr Pascal says they will be
bringing in compulsory labour soon. And when they do, I’ll have no choice.’

‘But you can claim exemption. On account of your cough, or the baby.’

‘Maybe I could, but—’

‘Don’t you want to?’ I said.

He did not answer. He sighed instead and took down
The Darkness Has a Thousand Voices
from the mantelpiece and turned over the pages. ‘I wish I knew what kind of country this baby will be born into,’ he said. ‘I wish I knew that everything would be all right. Anselm, my heart just feels like stone, as heavy as stone.’

‘It will be all right,’ I said. ‘The king has withstood all kinds of troubles.’

‘Has he? It feels like – I don’t know – like something is starting that no one understands. Or like the end of something. Like the end of the world.’

‘How do you know what the end of the world feels like?’ I said.

‘I can’t see any future any more.’

‘You shouldn’t talk like this, Papa. You only do it because you get so melancholy.’

‘Maybe you’re right.’ He stood up and stubbed out his last cigarette. ‘I’ll try and get some sleep,’ he said. ‘You should too.’

But I did not sleep until the light started to rise behind the houses, and every half-hour, I heard him turn over quietly. I knew he only let himself turn every thirty minutes, so as not to wake my mother, who slept lightly. It seemed to me the loneliest sound, to hear him turning over like that in the darkness, and I could not sleep because of it. That, and thinking of Michael.

* * *

When we woke the next morning, the city was different. The people who passed our shop were strangely agitated as they hurried to work, laughing too loudly or talking in furtive groups. Mr Pascal came in before we had even opened up the shop. My mother was still upstairs dressing for work.

‘You had better come and see this, North,’ he remarked in his most ominous tone.

We followed him out. There was a chill of autumn in the air this early. Leo was shivering faintly as we walked. Mr Pascal led us down an alleyway and pointed up at the wall. Letters were daubed there in streaking blue paint:
THE NEW IMPERIAL ORDER WILL TAKE BACK WHAT LUCIEN LOST
.
JOIN US OR DIE
.’

‘It’s all over the city apparently,’ said Mr Pascal, shielding his eyes to gaze up at the words. ‘They must have been everywhere. It must have taken hundreds of people to do it. I wonder what the king will have to say about this.’

Leo was still shivering, with his arms folded tightly across his chest.

‘Maybe it doesn’t mean anything,’ I said.

‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ said Mr Pascal. ‘It looks like civil war.’

The pharmacist and her husband came out and studied the letters. The greengrocers across the road still had their grilles up. They had taken a cautious attitude since food prices went up the year before, and now with the slightest hint of trouble, they did not open.

‘And I’ll show you something worse,’ said Mr Pascal.

Leo was already following Mr Pascal along the alleyway.
I went after them. We came to a halt at the side of a half-demolished house.

‘Look,’ said Mr Pascal with a certain pride in his discovery. One whole side of the building was covered with a face – a man with a scar across his right cheek and his hand raised in a gesture of defiance. It must have taken them half the night to do this. I thought at first it was Rigel, and that was the famous scar they said he gained in the revolution. But the way Mr Pascal was sighing and shaking his head, I could tell this was no revolutionary hero.

‘Ahira,’ said Leo very quietly.

‘That’s right,’ said Mr Pascal.

‘Ahira?’ I said, startled. ‘Why would someone paint Ahira on the wall?’

‘It’s a criminal offence,’ said Mr Pascal. ‘You are not allowed to paint a war criminal on the walls of this city. Whoever did that will be afraid to show their face again.’

‘Who’s Ahira?’ said a small voice, and I turned. Jasmine was standing beside me, her thumb in her mouth.

‘Jasmine, go straight back to the shop,’ said Leo. ‘Anselm, take her.’

‘No,’ said Jasmine. ‘I want to know who that man is.’

‘I’ll tell you on the way back,’ I said. She followed me for a few steps, then dragged her feet in the dust. ‘Come on, Jasmine.’

‘Tell me now,’ she said.

‘He’s no one. Just a man who worked for Lucien. Come on.’

‘Who’s Lucien?’

‘You know Lucien.’

‘No, I don’t.’

I had never thought about Jasmine not knowing these things. ‘Who’s Lucien?’ Jasmine repeated.

‘He used to rule this country, until I was three months old,’ I said. ‘He was – what was the name?’

‘Commander of the Realm,’ said Leo, who had fallen in beside us. ‘Jasmine, will you please hurry?’

‘Billy and Joe are playing out under the tree,’ said Jasmine, pointing towards the pharmacist’s sons. ‘Can I go?’