Voices in the Dark (39 page)

There was a silence. She raised a hand to her forehead and breathed shakily. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘Why can’t the midwife do something?’ I said.

‘Anselm, shh. You’re making my head ache. There’s nothing she can do. It’s just the winter fever, like Father Dunstan said.’

‘Please, just try and have a few vegetables. I can’t sit here and see you eating nothing.’

She tried, but it did no good. She pushed the plate aside and retreated to her bedroom, without troubling even to take off her shoes as she got awkwardly into bed. Jasmine brought a tin bowl for her, because she was already looking sick, and I brushed out her limp hair. She still kept trying to smile weakly as I looked at her. I did not understand how this had happened. With no ceremony about it, and while we were all looking the other way, she had faded and fallen very sick. And it only made me feel more guilty, because I could not help thinking now of the other time. I saw her at fourteen years old, and myself the baby, and I felt
responsible for all her sickness and all the trials of our family since. I had always known it, really. Even when I was a young boy. I had always thought I was the reason that everyone’s lives altered sixteen years ago. It was never just coincidence.

That night, I dreamed about Michael again. He came out of the dark and spoke to me. He had some revolutionary medal on his chest. When he raised it to show me, I could see a bullet hole dark with blood under where the medal had been. He did not notice it at first. Then the blood began to run out of it. ‘Michael,’ I was saying. ‘Michael.’ But he could not hear. Then at last he saw. He tried to stop the blood, but it was no good, and I could do nothing either, and all the time the blood was running and he was growing paler.

I came back from a long way off. I was lying on the hard floorboards with the bedcovers twisted around me and one hand gripped around the head of the bed like a sailor clinging to some piece of wreckage. And downstairs, someone was hammering on the door.

In the second before I was properly awake, I thought it was Michael home again, or Leo. I stood up and pressed my face against the window, but it was too dark to see out. The hammering came again. I ran across the living room and down the stairs and stood irresolute in the middle of the shop. Then I went forward and unbolted the door.

There was no one there. The street was deserted. Terror came over me suddenly, and I slammed the door shut and locked it. I was certain it was the Imperial Order. Jasmine was behind me, hopping up and down in the doorway with fear. ‘Jasmine, go back upstairs,’ I said.

Outside, someone sniggered. We both started. Then the
thumping came again. This time I saw them through the grilles on the shop’s front window. Just a gang of boys, no older than me, with bottles of spirits in their hands, laughing stupidly.

‘Anselm?’ my mother called from upstairs. ‘What is it?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Go to sleep.’

We went back upstairs. The lamp was burning in her room, and she was leaning over the side of the bed, retching, her beautiful hair tangled and matted.

‘Make them stop,’ Jasmine said.

‘All right.’ I handed her the tin bowl. ‘Hold this for Mama. I’ll go and tell them to leave. And get Grandmother to wake up and do something.’

The thumping came again. I was ready this time. I opened the door and was in the snow and running. Two or three people were ahead of me, laughing and waving the bottles in their hands. I recognized John Keller among them. ‘What are you doing?’ I shouted. ‘Bastards like you should be arrested – do you know that? Stupid bastards!’ I shouted a lot of other things that only made them crow louder with laughter and double over in the snow. I could not see them properly. I thought there was blood in my eyes, because my vision had turned red.

‘You always owe my father money,’ said John Keller when he had recovered himself. ‘He is being too lenient with you, so I thought we would come and teach you a lesson.’

Even in my rage, I despised that high-class sentence: ‘Teach you a lesson.’ I started forward and pushed him to the ground. Hitting him was the release of everything that had turned my heart black over the past weeks. And then his friends were no longer laughing, only shouting and
trying drunkenly to pull me off him. Police officers appeared round the corner and shone lanterns in our faces.

John Keller was lying motionless in the snow. I turned my face to the wall of the pharmacist’s shop and leaned there, shaking with fear. Even when John got dazedly to his feet, I still believed he was dead. I believed it because just for a second, I had fully intended to do it. Leo had killed someone, and Ahira had. It was no more than my destiny.

The police officers marched me back into the shop and took names and addresses and details. My grandmother could hardly speak with outrage, and all I could do was ask, ‘Is John Keller all right? Is he all right?’ over and over again.

‘Yes,’ said the kindest of the officers. ‘He’ll have a concussion if he is unfortunate, but beyond that he will be fine.’

John was shouting curses over his shoulder as the police ushered him and his friends away. His blood lay darkly on the snow; I could see it even from the shop. I rested my head against my hands. ‘We don’t have time to sort out personal grievances,’ the officer told me after he had attempted to unravel the story. ‘You owe his father three thousand crowns, as it seems. If you pay the money, the law is on your side. If you don’t, it is on his. Now fight it out between you.’

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘That boy’s father is our landlord. He will do something – I know he will.’

‘He can hardly throw you out in the snow,’ said the officer.

‘You don’t know what he is like—’

The other officer raised his hands, then let them fall again. ‘There is nothing we can do any more,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

The house was very quiet after they left us. I listened to my grandmother’s scolding without complaint, then sat alone and watched the last coal burn on the fire. The next morning at school, John Keller pushed past me so hard that I almost fell, and he whispered,‘We are sending in the debt collectors. We are sending them in tomorrow, so watch out.’

‘We’ll have to go to your grandmother’s,’ my mother told us.

Jasmine and I stood sullenly side by side and could not argue. My grandmother came back after work with her barrow, and we began piling our belongings onto it and dismantling our life while my mother watched helplessly, tears rolling down her cheeks. Her despair at leaving the shop made each box feel as heavy as stone.

We hardly took anything. Even with ten journeys between Trader’s Row and Old College Lane, we had to leave most of it. The furniture was not ours anyway. I gave the contents of the shop to Mr Pascal, under the agreement that he would pay me fifty per cent of what he made as the goods sold. I knew he was profiting more than we were, but I was too weary to fight the point. On the second day, Jared Wright saw us clearing out our belongings and stood watching with an air of faint puzzlement. Neither my grandmother nor Jasmine noticed him. They went ahead of me across the snow, the barrow pitching and sliding between them, piled perilously with our saucepans and half of Leo’s books. I felt ashamed to have everything we owned exposed to the street like this. I had a box clutched to my chest that contained Leo’s battered collection of Harold North books.

‘What’s all this?’ said Jared, sauntering towards me and eyeing the box.

‘We are leaving,’ I said.

‘Leaving Trader’s Row? Can it be?’

‘Our landlord issued a notice.’

‘Who is your landlord?’

‘Doctor Keller.’

‘I know Doctor Keller, and I could put in a word. Do you want me to? It might do some good.’

I shook my head. I wanted to leave the shop. I would rather struggle with the ridiculous barrow through the snow, taking apart our old life, than stay here and fight any longer. ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘It was time to move on anyway. There’s no point in trying to stay when he wants us to leave; we won’t win.’

‘Anselm,’ he said, half exasperated. ‘If you would just let me help you—’

‘No,’ I said. ‘We don’t need anyone’s help.’

It was nearly impossible to be in the same two rooms as my grandmother. Even just arranging our things in the corners and listening to her as she tutted and threw shawls over them made me want to turn round and walk away into the snow. Our shop looked strangely empty now. The last few nights we slept in it were just out of habit. By the end of the week, we had cleared out everything we could take and had abandoned the rest. Most of the furniture was Dr Keller’s. My grandmother and I closed the door carefully, refusing to look at each other. ‘Come on,’she said then. And we had to leave. This was the end of it, our life on Trader’s Row. A few barrow loads of worthless belongings and a key that was no longer ours.

‘I’m just going to check one last time,’ I said. ‘I’ll catch up with you.’

I went back inside, but I did not know what I was looking for. I ran back up the stairs. The place was the same five rooms, except that the shelves and tables, usually piled precariously with books and papers and Jasmine’s toys, were deserted now. The living room was empty, the last embers of the fire fading in the grate. I straightened the chairs at the table out of habit and closed the curtains in Jasmine’s room to stop the snow from coming in. That window always leaked unless you wedged it shut with a book, and all the books were gone. As I turned, the curtains flailed in the draught; that was the only movement in our silent house.

Everything was still lying about in the shop, waiting for Mr Pascal to take it away. A newspaper from last week, a broken teacup, and an old chair I had been halfway through sanding stood on the table of the back room. I checked the drawers of the counter, but they were full of rubbish. As I straightened up, Leo’s presence was there suddenly. I remembered him writing our name on the sign, precariously balanced on that old ladder in his soldier’s boots. I wandered through the shop, trying to fix our old life in my mind for ever, but it was already the past. Then I ran back up the stairs. I wrapped my jacket around my fist and smashed all the windows and let the snow howl through our empty house. After that, it was easier to turn and leave.

But the want of money never lets you go. The next day, the midwife took me to one side and recommended the government hospital for my mother. She would be in danger if she did not go there for the baby’s birth, and it would cost us two thousand crowns.

That night, I went back to the abandoned house beside the Royal Gardens. I was trying to think, and it seemed as good
a place as any. I had not been there since Michael had left. The snow was drifted so high against the barbed wire that I had to dig a space underneath it to crawl through. The house was more black and majestic in the snow; every tangle of dead plants and each broken carriage wheel was frosted over and glittering under the stars.

At the far side of the grounds was a frozen pool and what had once been an artificial waterfall but was now a mass of icicles and tangled grass. Michael and I used to throw a coin in and wish; Aldebaran had told me it was an English custom. Our traders’ upbringing decreed that we always took the coins out again. I tried to break the ice to see if there were any we might have forgotten, but it was too solid. There was a statue of an angel beside the waterfall, his mildewed face giving him a black and dismal look. I leaned forward and tried to brush the snow from the angel’s forehead, but it was fixed there and would not let go.

The angel reminded me of my father’s grave. I had been back to Devil’s Cross once and had stood before the memorial stone. I had sat on the steps of the de Fiore tomb in the snow, waiting for some trace of his spirit to speak to me. But I could not find it. Maybe it was superstition, but I thought his spirit must be where his ashes were buried, if they were buried at all. Somewhere in the north. I was certain it was Arkavitz. Perhaps that was where I would find what I was searching for.

I went back to the abandoned carriage, but the snow had drifted against the door, and I could not get it open. I made the circle of the house instead. Beyond the far wall, where the weeds and brambles rose so high that I had to struggle waist-deep through them, I came upon a light. It was burning behind a ragged curtain in the
cellar of the house. I hesitated, then went down the steps.

Cold had misted the window, but I could make out two people inside – a boy and a girl no older than me. The boy was adding coal to the grate. The firelight made his eyes shine very black. The girl was watching him. Every few minutes, she would reach up to push a strand of hair across her forehead. Their belongings were wrapped in a battered tarpaulin and piled beside them. Apart from the square of floor where they knelt, the room was dingy with cobwebs and filth. What looked like an old oil painting hung above the fireplace, some relic left there by the rich owner of this house more than sixteen years ago.

The boy stood up and rubbed his hands together. There were streaks of dirt across his face. A jewel glittered in his left ear, and it looked like something too good for his life, the way Jasmine looked in her new school boots at the start of every year. Then the girl put her hands around his, and he glanced up quickly and said something. Even through the glass, I could read the three words of her reply.

I turned and climbed the steps again and went on. A grudging snow was falling again, freezing my skin where it touched. I went back to the hole under the barbed wire and scrambled through. As I walked along the outside wall, I passed a long section that had crumbled and fallen. Perhaps the cold had cracked the cement that held it together. That must be how the boy and the girl had got in. As I went on, a streak of red caught my glance. It was an old slogan, daubed on the wall years ago and covered with ivy; but now the wall had fallen and taken the ivy down with it.

I made out
HERE
and
CRIMINAL
. Night was falling fast, but I struck a match and raised it and began scraping the frost off the wall to try and make out the letters. The words emerged
slowly:
HERE DWELLS AHIRA
,
CRIMINAL AND MURDERER
.