The Servants Read online

  He changed into his pajamas and got into bed. He found he was breathing in shallow, rapid breaths again, which probably might not be a good idea, but he didn’t know how to stop it. Also, it was comforting.

  He turned the light off and pulled the covers right up to his chin. He had to remind himself to close his eyes, and after he’d done that he felt a little better. He could smell the laundry detergent that had been used on the sheets, and nothing else: no smoke, no cooking, no wax. He could hear the sound of a couple of men walking past in the square outside, on the way to a pub called The Temple Bar—he heard one of them say this to someone on a cell phone, and he heard the sound of their feet on the wet sidewalk. In the very far distance, he could hear a siren.

  He listened to all of these things, as hard as he could. They were the only things there were to hear, and all of these sounds behaved in the way he expected them to. He kept listening to them, and to the sound of his breaths, as they gradually became less frequent, and deeper. He concentrated on the feeling of air entering and leaving his body.

  Very soon, he fell asleep. At some point in the night, he woke, thinking he could hear the sound of coughing from upstairs.

  But quickly he went under again.

  ten

  By lunchtime, Mark barely remembered what he’d seen, much less believed in it. Though at first this amazed him, he soon realized why.

  It had been a dream.

  He’d woken with a start the next morning, hearing the door to his bedroom open. David stood there.

  “There’s toast in the kitchen,” he said.

  He didn’t wait for Mark to say anything, but just left, shutting the door behind him. Mark sat up quickly. Looked around. Everything was as it should be. He got out of bed, and noticed right away that his leg didn’t hurt. Some part of him had been unconsciously braced for discomfort, and was immediately surprised when there wasn’t any.

  He walked in a circle, to check. No, it didn’t hurt at all.

  He went to the window and pulled the curtains wide. The clouds of the last few days had disappeared, and the sky was once more clear and bright. The clasp on the window was done up nice and tight.

  Mark showered quickly and ate a bowl of cereal, ignoring the toast in the rack. Once dressed, he went to the bottom of the stairs, but the gatekeeper was already in position. He started to say something, but Mark turned and left the house.

  He walked quickly down to the seafront and along the promenade. This morning there were a few other boys hanging around the skateboard area again, and for a while Mark sat on the curb and watched them. When he started to try a few things for himself, he found he didn’t mind that he fell over. He kept concentrating on what he was doing, doing things over and over again, absorbing himself fully in the process. This felt like the right thing to do.

  The departure of the rain had left the air colder than earlier in the week, but before long Mark had got quite warm. He took a break and walked up the front for a while, past David’s boundary again. The sounds of traffic up on the road were very clear. The sunlight that glinted off the pebbles and piles of metal chairs stacked outside the cafés was sharp and bright. He could smell both the sea and wafts of coffee from the places that had decided the weather was good enough to open. It was all very…real.

  And, consequently, made it much harder to believe in anything else.

  It had to have been a dream. The only question was where it began, and where it stopped. He could have fallen asleep in the old lady’s chair, then dreamed he’d woken, stolen the key from the drawer, and gone into the back of the house. Then he’d woken up properly—still in the chair—in a fuzzy and disoriented state, and bolted upstairs.

  That made sense, but there was another solution too.

  If he’d really fallen from the window in the way he (thought he) remembered, then surely it should still hurt now? So perhaps he’d never even left his bedroom, and the whole thing had just been in his imagination. He knew the memory of tearing up David’s stupid book was real, because he’d found the plastic bag where he’d expected it to be and had brought it out with him to dispose of in one of the promenade’s huge metal trash cans. But after that…

  Just a dream.

  Except…it still didn’t quite feel like one. Even though much of what he’d thought he’d seen and heard had been bleached away in the sun—along with the fear he could remember feeling—it still felt like something that had actually happened.

  He’d had dreams like that before, however.

  More than once he’d dreamed that, after the night his dad had left home—a year ago now—he had come back. When he’d woken in the mornings after those dreams, Mark had been so convinced of their reality that he’d run straight into his parents’ bedroom, full of fierce joy: only to find his mother alone in their bed, already awake, staring up at the ceiling as if reading a sad story written on it.

  His mind had tricked him then. Probably it had done so again.

  But…

  AT lunchtime, he went back to the house, briefly. It did not go well. He was allowed upstairs. His mother was in the sitting room, propped up with pillows. Her hair looked as though it could do with a wash, which was unusual. He asked straight away if they could all go into town together. His mother listened to him, nodding, and Mark felt his hopes rise. But by the end she had stopped moving her head, and said maybe tomorrow—today she was feeling a little tired.

  Mark was so disappointed, and so desperate, that he found himself turning to his stepfather to try to enlist his support. David’s big argument was that the weather was bad, wasn’t it? Well, today it was fine! So…

  But David was cleverer than that, of course. He didn’t need the weather today. Mark’s mother had made her choice.

  Mark suddenly had a vision of her never leaving this floor of the house, just living here for years and years and years. It wasn’t like her. Whenever they’d gone away in the past, she’d always been the one who wanted to go out and do things. The time they’d gone to Florida, it had been his dad who wanted to sit around the pool and get brown—his mother was always packing Mark in the car and going off to see what there was to see in the area, even if there really wasn’t very much.

  She was feeling down, that was obvious. She needed someone to get her back on her feet again, and out to the shops. Mark’s dad could have done it, he knew that. He…he could just do things. He was a proper dad. He understood how Brighton worked and the kind of things you were supposed to do in it. David didn’t know Brighton at all. All he knew was his house, and so that was the only place he ever wanted them to be. He couldn’t recapture the way things had used to be, because he hadn’t been there, wasn’t even a part of it—just as he’d never seen the world’s ex-champion female penguin swimmer, flapping her wings in the sun and squawking as baby penguins waddled up and down.

  “Mark, I’m sorry,” his mother said.

  Mark nodded jerkily. He could feel David’s eyes on him all the way out of the room.

  As he left the house, he hesitated at the top of the stairs that descended to the old lady’s level. Her door was shut, however, and there was no sign anyone was inside.

  He walked down to the seafront. Turned right, instead of left, and walked as far as he could. In the end, the promenade ran out and there was just an asphalt path beside the pebble beach, and a small café, with a couple of people sitting, not talking, wrapped up warm and staring out at the brightness of the sea.

  Nothing else.

  THAT night they ordered in from Wo Fat again, however, Mark didn’t even have to ask. When he got upstairs after the afternoon’s walk, the menu was already sitting waiting on the end of his mother’s couch.

  “Write down what you want,” David said in passing. His voice was flat. Mark got the idea that there had already been a discussion over the matter, and that his stepfather had lost.

  The food tasted even better than it had the previous time.

  WHEN Mark was in bed, hours lat
er, he woke up to find himself feeling really thirsty. Whenever Chinese food was under discussion, David muttered something about MSG. Mark knew that wasn’t the issue, however—the problem was not having enough Diet Coke to drink with it. His real dad always ordered a huge bottle of the stuff at the same time as the food, to make sure. Though cans of Coke were on the shopping list—and there to stay; there’d been a huge row over this soon after they came down to Brighton—David never seemed to buy quite enough. He bought some, so no one could say he wasn’t buying it, but it always ran out fast. David was so neat and perfect. Neat and perfect people didn’t drink Diet Coke.

  Mark got out of bed. The clock on the VCR said it was after midnight, and the house was very quiet. They’d evidently gone to bed upstairs. He padded out of his room and into the hallway, and then into the kitchen. The kitchen was one of the things David had installed after buying the house. The units were all new, and it was obvious nothing had ever happened in here. The oven still even had a label hanging off it. It was like a display in IKEA, more like a serving suggestion than a room. The only sign people even lived here was a tiny blotch on the counter, like a little piece of ash. Mark wiped it off with his finger and everything was perfect again.

  He opened the fridge, looking for something else to drink. Fruit juice would have to do. He went to one of the wall cupboards and opened it to get a glass. And thought he heard something.

  He froze, motionless, and it suddenly occurred to him that the kitchen down in the basement had a skylight. That meant there was nothing on top of it. He turned, judged the depth of the room he was standing in, and then added the length of the room serving as his bedroom.

  Then looked back at the cupboard.

  It was the back wall, of course. There must be an empty space on the other side of it, for light to get down to the panes of glass in the ceiling of the kitchen downstairs.

  Mark walked out of the kitchen and into the hallway.

  Yes. On the right-hand side was a bit more corridor, and then the bathroom. He went into it and saw, of course, there was a small window on the right wall. The glass was heavily frosted, however, and you couldn’t see anything through it—not least because it was dark outside. You couldn’t open it more than an inch, either, nowhere near enough to get a glimpse of anything below.

  He returned to the kitchen and went back to the cupboard again. He stood there for a whole ten minutes, quietly drinking his juice. But he didn’t hear the sound again, and so he couldn’t try to work out whether it had just been a pigeon, cooing from somewhere below, or something else.

  IT took him a long time to get back to sleep. When your ears are attuned for listening, every noise pretends it is something it’s not. Mark heard creaks as the house settled, the whisper of distant traffic, snatches of voices from the sidewalk outside. He heard coughing in the night, wet and ragged upheavals that went on for a long time. He heard the sound of his hair rustling on the pillow.

  When he finally drifted off, it was to an unsettled place, and when he got up the next morning, he knew what he was going to do. He had to find out whether something had really happened, or not.

  And to do that, there was someone he had to talk to.

  eleven

  It took him a long time to come up with a plan. He walked up and down the seafront with his skateboard, but never put it down. He was thinking all this time, thinking hard—about as hard as he’d ever thought in his life, about anything. When nothing came to him, he started to become irritable, panicky. He’d never tried to do something like this before. In a way it was a kind of lying, he supposed, which you weren’t supposed to do. Not being able to do something that you knew was wrong in the first place was a new and different kind of frustration. He didn’t enjoy the feeling. He’d decided he needed to do something, however, and this was all he could think of—and he couldn’t get past that decision in his head. It was in the way of everything else.

  Like David, in fact.

  It was only as Mark was walking back toward the house that he finally had an idea that might work. He reached into his back pocket, found he had a few pounds, and diverted his course toward The Meeting Place.

  Most of the hut’s serving side was made up of a waist-high glass-fronted cabinet, displaying a selection of the things you could eat—the things, that is, that didn’t require preparation by the strange, crab-faced woman who lurked in the back, perpetually wreathed in steam and hissing sounds, announcing the completion of breakfasts and toasted sandwiches over the PA in a croaking mutter, like some kind of a cooking orc.

  In the cabinet, there were desserts, sausage rolls, sandwiches, bread rolls with twenty different fillings. Salads. Big gateau-like things, covered in cream. Cheesecakes. And more old-fashioned items…

  Mark bent over and searched carefully until he found what he was looking for. Then he straightened up and smiled at one of the Eastern European people standing waiting for his order.

  “One rock cake, please,” he said.

  HE ate lunch with his mother and David up in her room. His mother was looking quite well, and stood up to go have a look out of the window, across at the sea. She’d washed her hair and it looked thick and brown again. She didn’t quite go as far as mentioning the idea of going shopping, but she did talk about lots of other things—like the fact the walls in the stairway needed some pictures—and some of those involved going into town at some stage. Mark was beginning to realize he had to play this tactically, and didn’t push her on it, didn’t give David anything concrete to disagree with.

  Instead he just listened and chatted, knowing things were starting to go his way—especially when his mother said, with some firmness, that she wanted to go out to dinner that night.

  “That’s great,” David said.

  He and Mark’s mother talked about it, working out places they could go that had parking—even soliciting Mark’s opinion from time to time. Mark didn’t like the sound of any of the places being mentioned (none appeared even remotely Oriental, or were called Spring Rolls R Us), but his mind was elsewhere and he let them get on with it.

  He left them still talking, and went downstairs.

  HE waited for two hours, until mid-afternoon. That was the right kind of time to do this. Then he left the house and walked around the square, up to the top, around the other side, and back up again—so, should anyone be watching, it would look as though he’d just come up from the seafront.

  When he got back to the house, he took a deep breath and headed down the narrow metal stairs. Nothing happened after he knocked on the door, and his heart started to sink. It hadn’t occurred to him that she might not be in.

  Then finally he heard the sound of shuffling feet, and a click. The door opened.

  “Hello,” the old lady said.

  Mark held up the brown paper bag. “I was passing a place,” he said, “and they had these. I wondered if you’d like one.”

  She took the bag from him and looked inside.

  “That’s very kind,” she said. “I’m a little tired today. Couldn’t face the walk. Very lazy of me, I know.”

  Mark shrugged, smiled, took a step back from the door. He knew he mustn’t seem too eager to come in, that the rock cake should come across as a gift, and nothing more. “Cool,” he said.

  The old lady opened the door a little wider.

  “Would you like to come and share it? I never can seem to finish one by myself. Though I think I might have already told you that.”

  MARK’s plan was simple. He merely wanted to see if the old lady said anything that made it easier for him to work out where the dream had started the other night. Now he was actually here, however, he realized there was a problem in how to bring the subject up.

  He tried mentioning that he’d spent yesterday practicing on his skateboard, hoping that she might say something like, “Didn’t your leg hurt too much?” But she merely smiled, as if he’d said he whiled away the time trying to balance an otter on his head, and he realiz
ed it was possible she didn’t even know what skateboarding was.

  They each ate half of the rock cake—and this time, knowing what to expect, Mark found he rather enjoyed it. When he had finished, realizing how clumsy it sounded, Mark said how nice it had been, even better than cookies. The old lady just nodded.

  “The old cakes are the best,” she said.

  “Though I do like custard creams,” Mark countered cunningly.

  “Very nice,” she agreed—failing to make a reference to Brunswick Cream, or anything else that would help Mark work out whether that part had actually happened.

  It was another brick wall. Mark supposed he could just come straight out and ask, saying, “Um, did you open your door the afternoon before last, to find I’d crash-landed outside?” If she said yes, though, that still left the heart of the problem unresolved.

  So he tried something else. “I had a weird dream the other night.”

  She was silent for a moment.

  “Did you?” she asked eventually, turning to look at him.

  He’d never really noticed how sharp her eyes were. Most old people’s eyes seemed to go vague and watery, slack and pink around the lids—as if a lifetime of looking at things had completely worn them out. Hers were not like that. They were very clear, and gray, and looked as if they could see a long way. Something in the combination of their directness and the way she’d said “Did you?” made him wonder what exactly she was asking. Was she saying “Did you?” in a polite way, like “Oh yes?” or “Is that so?”—or was she asking something else? Was she actually asking whether what he was talking about had, in fact, only been a dream?

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I never dream,” she said, and looked away.

  That seemed to be the end of that. Mark resorted to going back to laboriously engineered mentions of skateboarding, but he could tell her attention was drifting. It was very warm in the tiny room, and the window wasn’t open even a little bit. The clock was ticking heavily in the background. The old lady had begun to look a little dozy, and Mark hadn’t made any headway at all. He kept trying to find some way of broaching the subject but got stuck in a circuitous ramble about various features of the promenade, and when he finally looked up, he saw she was asleep.