скачать книгу бесплатно
‘You tell her,’ the lad says, and I dig him shuttup in the ribs.
‘Oh, don’t be mean,’ he says. ‘Even nutters need friends.’
‘You have him then. Personally, he’s not my type.’
As soon as we reach a busier part of the promenade the madman stops as if at an invisible checkpoint. He stands muttering, and then the mutters turn to shouts and the shouts into shrieks as we pull away. I think I still hear them long after we’re gone, like the howls of a beast. At last we reach La Gigo Gi, where my ears are soon burning in the warmth. The boy brings our drinks and sits down, sweeping spilt sugar into a heap and tweezing it up with his fingers. When he’s done, he looks up and smiles. ‘I like to be tidy,’ he says, ‘don’t you? How old are you, by the way?’
I tell him I’m just sixteen and he raises an eyebrow. Then, to my horror, pushes his chair back and shakes his head. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘Way too young for me. I really can’t be seen talking to you.’
Standing, he turns away, and I can’t believe it – until I see the smile on his face and realise he’s joking.
‘You have a weird sense of humour.’
‘Have to,’ he says. ‘Otherwise I’d go crazy.’
I start to laugh, but his face is so serious, it dies halfway. He sits down again, picking up the free biscuit that came with his coffee. It’s some buttery, almond thing and I watch him bite into it from the cover of my fringe. Tiny crumbs of sugar stick to his lips and his tongue comes out to catch them. While he’s looking down, I tuck the stray hair behind my ears and wipe at my face.
‘You look fine,’ he says. ‘I like your hair, though I bet you hate it. Girls always want what they don’t have.’
He’s right. I don’t mind the colour, which is what they call auburn, but I would rather it was straight. I lift a curl and twirl it round my finger, but he’s gazing out of the window where the sky is white and cold.
‘How come I’ve not seen you around?’ I ask. ‘At school I mean.’
He stares at me and sighs. ‘I only came this September. And I haven’t seen you either.’
I wonder where he was before. He has such a fancy voice I’m sure it was a private place, but I daren’t ask because I don’t want any questions back. If I tell him he hasn’t seen me because I haven’t been able to face it, he’ll want to know why, and who knows what’ll come spilling out? He’d think I was madder than the tramp if he knew that the reason I’m sometimes not in school is because I’m seeing a psychologist. People always do, even if they don’t say so.
He must notice my hesitation because he sits forward and smiles. ‘So,’ he says, ‘why are you bunking off?’
I’m about to change the subject like I always do, when something strange happens and I find myself talking as if it’s nothing to do with me at all. A whole stream of words that burst out together in one breath: ‘It’s my brother,’ I tell him. ‘He died. Everyone thinks I should be over it by now, but I’m not. They think it’s because I miss him, I suppose, but I don’t. They’d think I was evil if I said so, but I just don’t.’
‘Oh,’ he says and waits for me to go on, but it’s more than I’ve admitted to anyone before. I feel the panic rising and it must show in my face because he shakes his head. ‘Forget it,’ he says. ‘If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine. Leave it.’
We sit there, avoiding each other’s eyes, but just as it’s getting awkward he asks for my number and email address. After that we leave, walking through the town in a warm silence. We wander for hours, in and out of shops, along the pier and through the arcades. We buy sandwiches and take them down to the promenade to eat like we’ve known each other for years. I watch his face when I’m sure he won’t notice, and follow the calm movement of his hands as he rolls up the sandwich wrappers. Once it’s late enough he walks me home and when we reach the bottom of my road he stuffs his hands in his pockets and grins. For a boy who’d obviously been blubbing when I met him, he smiles more than most people.
‘Goodbye then,’ he says and goes ten paces before turning back and calling out: ‘Oh! How stupid – I don’t know your name. Mine is Joe. Joe Steen.’
‘Coo,’ I say. ‘At least that’s what everyone calls me.’
‘Coo,’ says Joe. ‘Coo. Like a dove. I like that.’
I stand and watch him till he disappears. He’s put a long coat over his uniform and his blonde head seems to shine. For the first time in ages, I reach home without thinking how much I hate it there. It’s not the place itself but the silence; especially the silence in Sam’s empty room. I don’t think about that today, though. Today I don’t mind going in, because I’ve got something new to think about. Something that makes me feel warm and wanted instead of empty and afraid.
2. (#uce819c4a-cfbe-5ded-a5ac-1e6fdc8bae2d)
We’ve lived in Brighton for two years. Before that we lived in Oxford and before that, somewhere else. Mum and Dad would decide that this move would be the last; that a change of scene would do it. It wouldn’t, of course, so then they’d decide that Sam would manage on his own if they paid his rent, but nothing lasted. After a few months, he’d turn up on our doorstep looking dirty and desperate, and Mum and Dad would let him right on in. I would have just shut the door in his face, brother or not, but no one listened to me – and now we are three.
You can still see us as a whole family in the photo on my bedroom wall – Mum, Dad, Sam and me. It’s taken in the before; you can tell because we’re smiling. The photo shows us on holiday, wearing shorts and squinting in the sun. I’m just a toddler, and Sam is about ten. He stands in front of us grinning, one hand brushing the curls from his eyes and the other waving into the future with no idea of where he’s heading. I leave it up so I can remember that it wasn’t always like this.
Our house is in a long row. It has three storeys and two front doors: a normal one that leads into the hall and another for what used to be a downstairs room and is now Mum’s antiques shop. Two people are coming out as I arrive, with a glass lamp and a curly legged table tucked under their arms, which makes them look like escaping thieves instead of customers. There’s a little tussle on the doorstep while we do that dance people do when they’re in each other’s way, and it’s as I stand aside to let them pass that I see him. The mad tramp is right there at the end of our row, watching. His hair, lifted by the wind, is held back by a grubby claw and he says nothing, only stares at me for a long moment before baring his teeth in a yellow grin.
I’m frozen in place, staring back while he begins to move towards me, dropping a can into the gutter as if he wants both hands free…
I clutch the door handle. If I go inside, he’ll know it’s where I live, but I’m scared to stay out here. He takes another step and stops dead. Someone is behind me.
‘Corinne?’
I jump before I realise it’s Matt, my friend and near neighbour. I turn and get behind him, shaking my head.
Matt steps forward and stares at the red-haired man who’s standing half in the gutter. ‘You want something?’ he asks.
The tramp looks at him – slowly, up and down. He starts at Matt’s pointy leather boots and goes up all the way up to his blonde hair. His mouth curls open in a growl. Finally he spits out words: ‘Gotta message for that girl… Need to give it to her…’
‘Get lost,’ Matt tells him and leads me across the road to where he and Ben had been unloading their car.
‘Who the hell is that?’ he nods, but when we look back, the street is empty.
‘Thanks,’ I say.
‘Just being a good neighbour.’
‘Just getting out of helping me with this, you mean,’ Ben says.
We look down at the thing they were unloading and Matt laughs. ‘What the hell is it anyway?’ I say.
Ben sighs. ‘It is a statue of Pan,’ he explains. But to me it’s still just a weird sort of half-man-half-goat thing tootling away on some pipes.
‘Where are you putting it?’
‘Heaven knows,’ Ben says. ‘It’s a present from my sister. Probably stick it by the bath with a towel over its head.’
‘You didn’t make it to school then?’ Matt says to me, ignoring Ben. He nods at my uniform, then his watch, his pale eyes unblinking.
‘I meant to,’ I tell him.
He sighs. ‘Come round anytime. I could give you a lift.’
I look at my feet and nod. He’s not fooled.
Mum and Dad don’t have many friends here. Nor do I. When you have someone like Sam threatening to burst in on things at any moment, you tend to keep yourself to yourself. Ben and Matt are different, though. They knew all there was to know from the start – from the first day they moved in.
It was about a year ago and past midnight when I heard the hammering of fists on wood and Sam’s voice blaring into the night from across the street. I let Mum and Dad sleep and darted over to find him slumped on someone else’s doorstep with a cut on one eyebrow and tears on his face. The door opened and two men peered out, looking nervous.
‘It’s my brother,’ I said. ‘Sorry – he can’t help himself. We live over there, if you could just help…’
I was shivering in my dressing gown and one slipper, as they looked from me to Sam and back again.
‘Is he violent?’ one asked. ‘If not, bring him in. I don’t think we can move him any further. Don’t worry about disturbing us, we haven’t gone to bed yet.’
Between them they hoisted Sam up and carried him inside, feet echoing in the empty hallway. They dropped him on an old sofa and covered him with a throw.
‘We just moved here,’ the one with fair hair said. ‘Not much unpacked.’
Sam lay still on the red velvet as if he was dead; I sat with my two neighbours on the floor looking at him and tried to explain. I told them he was an alcoholic. I told them that even Mum and Dad were sometimes scared of him, and I told them I hated him. It poured out of me like water and they just sat there and took it all in. When I said sorry for the rubbish welcome to the neighbourhood, they smiled and one of them got up to offer me his hand, which seemed the thing to do. ‘Matt,’ he said, ‘and that’s Ben. Would you like some hot chocolate?’
While we drank it, they told me a bit about themselves. They looked as different as cloud and sun. Matt was blonde and trendy with tattoos from shoulder to wrist, and Ben was dark and neatly dressed. Perhaps he saw me looking from one to the other, because he grinned and nodded at Matt. ‘I’m the sensible one,’ he said. ‘I work for a software company while Matt is all creative and arty.’
‘Graphic design,’ Matt said. ‘He’s just old and stuffy, take no notice.’
I laughed. Ben must have been about thirty, but Matt wasn’t that much younger.
‘I don’t know why I stay with you, brat,’ Ben sniffed, but he didn’t mean it. They were so obviously happy together, they made me feel calm and safe.
They brought Sam home the next morning and Mum and Dad were so embarrassed they insisted on cooking breakfast. After that they were often round, especially Matt. I think mum liked to talk to him, and so did I. Things would have been different if he’d been my big brother. It was Ben and Matt who looked after me the night Sam died – my body curled into the same old sofa. They were my first grown-up friends.
I leave them to it now, fair head behind dark, carrying the weird statue inside – the same way they’d carried Sam that night we first met.
Once they’ve gone, I scour the street for any sign of the red-haired man. There’s only his dropped can, still leaking orangey stuff into the drain, so I slip indoors and stand in silence while my heart stops thumping, then creep down the hall to spy on Mum. She’s in the shop. I can see her through the glass door, counting cash, brown eyes narrowed in a frown and her fluffy hair caught up in a tortoiseshell clip. She’s got really thin since Sam died. Her hipbones would make a supermodel envious. Sometimes Dad creeps up, puts his arms round her and takes hold of them like he wants to steer her off somewhere, but she mostly pushes him away as if she has something urgent to do elsewhere. Her name is Karen, but one night – just after Sam died – she said that ‘Karen’ was gone and she was someone else now. I think that may be true.
I slip upstairs and take out the ‘Thought Diary’ I’m supposed to fill in for the psychologist – the ‘Shrink Woman’, as I call her. I open it and read:
‘Sam and I were friends once. He was my big brother who looked after me. Once he sat indoors and caught measles from me because he was drawing cartoons to keep me happy…’
There isn’t any more. It didn’t help to write about that Sam. That Sam began to vanish as he grew up and I didn’t like the one that took his place. It was like a creepy movie where a demon possesses one person in a family and sucks thelife out of all of them. He certainly drained me.
Now, though, after meeting Joe, something is changing. Down inside, where I thought I was sleeping, something stirs. I’m not even sure if I like him yet, but I want him to like me. I write his name in the margin of a new page, then wonder why I did it, so I hide it away and lie in blue dimness on my bed. The curtains are drawn and the faint noise from outside plays a background tune to my thoughts. No one will come looking for me until at least four o’clock. I can just lie here and do nothing at all.
3. (#uce819c4a-cfbe-5ded-a5ac-1e6fdc8bae2d)
Thought Diary:‘Wakey-wakey eggs ’n’ bakey.’
I wake with a jolt in the early hours. I’ve slept through the evening and the whole night too. I think for a minute that no one even missed me, but someone must have because I’m covered in a blanket. The worried feeling is there again, but today it only hovers, like an unsure guest. What gets me out of bed is the thought of Joe.
The house is silent as I creep downstairs, making a little jump past the door to Sam’s room. The kitchen is temptingly warm, but I’m not hungry yet. I shove two croissants into a brown paper bag and let myself out into the cold morning.
I like this empty time. The air is fresh, the sky streaked with the new morning, and despite what happened yesterday, I head for the beach. It’s my thinking place and no nutcase will keep me away. All the same, I go a different way and walk right along the shoreline, just in case.
The air is full of seagulls squabbling over the tide’s edge, snatching bits of dead fish and jumping into the wind to escape with them. There’s a family out early with a brown puppy, a little girl screaming and laughing at the dog as it dares the breakers. Usually, I hate happy families, but today I smile. Perhaps this is progress; something to tell the Shrink Woman to shut her up.
I leave them behind and walk until I’m halfway to The Mansion, then stop to look out across the grey water. It’s because the wind is in my ears and my mind’s far away that I don’t hear the scrunch of feet until they’re right behind me. I whirl round, remembering the red-headed man, slipping on the loose stones in panic. For a moment I think perhaps it’s Joe, but it’s not. I glimpse a dark coat and long hair and recognise him – the tramp with the pale face who saved me from the shouter. I turn back, heart thumping, waiting for him to go past, but he doesn’t. Instead he comes over to me and sits down right at my feet.
‘Hi,’ he says, but I don’t answer. I can feel him there and worse – I can smell him. It’s the stink that alcohol makes when people take it like food until it oozes out of their pores. A smell that makes me feel sick and afraid.
Just down towards the water is a little pyramid of stones someone has left, and the man starts to pick up pebbles and lob them at it: chunk, chunk, chunk.
‘I wanted to say sorry,’ he says, ‘for what happened with Alec. He’s a mad bugger, but he shouldn’a done that. I notice people who come around and I see you lots, walking on your own. I told him to lay off.’
Maybe it’s his voice, which is unexpectedly calm and gentle, but instead of walking away, I answer him as if he’s just a regular person.
‘Why do you notice?’ I say. ‘Don’t you have anything better to do?’
He throws more pebbles. I can see his hand sticking out of a black coat sleeve – long, knotty fingers, dirty with an oily grime. Across his knuckles is tattooed ‘Lilyn’.
I already know the answer to my question. Of course he doesn’t have anything better to do, because he’s a tramp; an alky that soaks himself in booze until he can’t stand up. He probably makes someone else’s life a misery too, unless he’s done the decent thing and disappeared. He stays quiet and I feel awkward, as if he can hear my thoughts.
‘Why are you always down here then?’ he asks. ‘Don’t you go to school? You gotta get an education.’
I feel like laughing. ‘An education? Like you I suppose?’
He doesn’t answer, just sends a big, grey stone crashing into the pyramid, tipping it sideways.
‘I do go,’ I find myself saying, ‘but I’m allowed leeway.’ I use that word a lot – leeway. It’s what the headmaster said. It means I’m allowed to do things other people can’t, because I lost my brother in difficult circumstances. Stupid words – like we got separated in a storm or something – when Sam was the difficult circumstances.
‘They don’t want me to freak out,’ I say, ‘or do something weird – like I am right now, talking to some… tramp.’
I look at him to see whether he minds what I said, but he’s smiling at me. He’s waiting for the answer to a question I didn’t hear him ask.
‘I said, do you want what’s in that bag?’ he repeats. ‘’Cos if not, I’ll have it.’
He grabs the bag when I hold it out and folds a croissant into his mouth in one go, chewing it up while staring out across the grey water. I take the chance to have a good look at him. He’d have an okay face if it wasn’t so tired looking. It’s criss-crossed with little cuts, all bright red on the white skin, as if someone’s cleaned round them. His hair would be a reddish brown if he washed it, but now it’s greasy and hangs in long waves to his collar. His eyes, despite being weary and watery, have green flecks running through them, like gemstones. I guess he’s about thirty – a grown man – and suddenly that worries me. I glance around and see we are alone. I shouldn’t be here.
He’s finished the croissant and is rolling a little cigarette with one hand.
‘I like it down here,’ he says. ‘It’s quiet – know what I mean?’
I do, but don’t answer, keeping my eyes instead on a big gull which struts up and down, eager for crumbs, its legs doing a nervous dance closer and closer. I step towards it and it takes off, only to drop down again not far off, waiting. I watch it for a moment then turn back. ‘I have to go,’ I say, and start to walk before stopping again. ‘But thanks for keeping that man off me.’
He doesn’t answer. He’s lying back now, eyes shut, one arm across his forehead blocking out the light. The cigarette has dropped from his fingers. He’s sleeping.
4. (#uce819c4a-cfbe-5ded-a5ac-1e6fdc8bae2d)
Thought Diary: ‘A whole lot of nothing.’ Me.
I feel rude for leaving him. He might wake up and wonder where I am, but I can’t just stay and watch him sleep. I walk away and think of him still lying there, long eyelashes on his cheek, snoozing as if he was on cushions. It’s not till I reach the promenade that I remember the other one – his mad mate – and then as if my thoughts have conjured him, he appears, weaving across the path towards me. He comes right up and stands there, nose to nose, almost touching. He stinks, and his lips are outlined with a grey scum which flies out as he speaks. I keep my mouth closed.
‘I told you,’ he says. ‘Gotta message for you – stay away! Don’t wanta see you.’
I’d love to go, really I would, but he doesn’t move. The rank smell from his clothes is disgusting. I can’t hold my breath for ever.
‘I know what you want,’ he tells me. ‘But you can’t touch me – I’m telling you.’
His hands come up close to my face so the black nails are in front of my eyes. I could tell him right now if he’d listen – the last thing I want to do is touch him!
His mouth curls open again and he spits at me, ‘Get!’
I don’t need to be told twice. Pushing sideways, I dart away from him and walk fast, refusing to run. When I glance back he’s still there, unmoving. I let my breath out in a long sigh.
I go to school on Monday. I wasn’t going to, but I do. Maybe it was the idea of seeing Joe – that he might be thinking the same and turn up too – but from the moment I woke up I felt sure I could do it.
