The Returners (3 page)

Dad pours another whisky for himself. I eye him warily.

Patrick sits down. ‘And how are you, Will? Behaving yourself at school? Haven’t been chucked out yet?’

I raise an eyebrow. He always asks the same questions, with a look in his eye that suggests he already knows the answers. ‘Not yet,’ I say.

‘He’s doing very well,’ Dad says immediately, even though he’s got no idea. ‘Aren’t you, Will?’

There’s a pause then, a silence. It’s awkward. Patrick looks at me with a half-smile on his face. ‘So got some homework to do then?’

It takes me a few seconds to realise this is my cue to leave. Not a bad idea, if Dad’s on the whisky.

‘Sure,’ I lie. Actually, it isn’t a lie – I have got homework to do. I just have no intention of actually doing it. Not now anyway.

But I loiter in the doorway. ‘You’re here about Mr Best? About Yan?’

Patrick looks at me sharply.

‘He was there, apparently,’ Dad says quickly, in case Patrick thinks he might have discussed the case with me. ‘Saw the whole thing.’

Patrick’s eyes widen and he looks at Dad, who shakes his head very slightly.

‘He saw Yan,’ he says. ‘Saw him crouching over the body, didn’t you, son?’

I nod uncertainly.

‘You did, did you?’ Patrick says. ‘How come we didn’t know?’

We. Like he’s in charge of the police force. He’s not even a policeman any more.

‘I didn’t hang about. I just saw Yan giving him mouth-to-mouth.’

‘Mouth-to-mouth?’ Patrick laughs darkly. ‘Yeah, that’d be right. He’d just killed the man. He was probably looking for his wallet.’

‘Maybe.’ I shrug.

‘Maybe?’ Patrick’s eyes narrow.

‘He was a long way away,’ Dad says. ‘He doesn’t know what he saw, not really.’

‘Still, you’ll need to go down to the station. Make a statement,’ Patrick says.

I think about this. I don’t want to go down to the police station. Even more people asking me if I’m keeping out of trouble, if I’m working hard at school, if I’ve got a girlfriend. It’s like there are only three questions that certain adults can think of when faced with a teenager.

‘Do I have to?’

Patrick winks at me. ‘How about you tell me what happened and I’ll see if it’s worth passing it on? How about that?’

I think about it for a second or two, then nod. ‘Yeah, OK.’

‘So why don’t I talk to your Dad first, then come upstairs and find you? What do you say?’

‘Fine,’ I say. I look at Dad. ‘I’ll be on the computer.’ He opens his mouth but nothing comes out. ‘Research,’ I say. His mouth closes.

I make my way upstairs to my room, turn my computer on, then, suddenly overcome with fatigue, I throw myself on the bed, allowing my eyes to close. My computer can wait. Right now, sleep can’t.

g

CHAPTER FOUR

I am hot. Too hot. The sun burns my skin. I’m running. The altitude is high; I catch my breath. I’m chewing something. Chocolate. No, not chocolate. Not sweet. It gives me energy. I’m thirsty, but I have nothing to drink. Up and up, like a mountain, but there are steps beneath my feet. I stumble but fear drives me forward, upward. Life or death. Survival or . . . My clothes stick to me, my shoes rub unbearably. I turn a corner, I am near the top. I must reach the top, must get far enough away. I scramble, using my hands now, flailing against the unforgiving clay. I pull, I heave, I push myself up. I am at the top. I am being pursued. I must get away from the mob. I must get away . . .

Another place – here there is a line of people ahead of me. Broken people – thin, frail, slumped, their eyes vacant, a flicker of something here and there but mostly they are looking down. For safety. They shuffle forward; no one speaks. The train behind them leaves. One or two turn to watch it go. Their faces are hollow. I reach up to feel my own face; I can feel nothing. Do I exist? Forward again, bags and children’s hands clutched tightly. There are two piles. One for clothes, one for bags. Two doors – one for women and children, one for men. The line inches forward. One or two people speak, make light of the situation. It is better, no? Things will improve. Don’t look like that – always so negative. A child cries; his mother pulls him to her.

It is days later. I can smell it. Death. Burning flesh. It fills my nose, fills my chest, I am choking, spluttering, it is consuming me. I am screaming, screaming, screaming . . .

I sit bolt upright, drenched in sweat; it takes me a few minutes to catch my breath, to slow my heart. I look around the room, disoriented. I was asleep. I look at my watch. It’s only 9 p.m. I breathe in and out, slowly. I remember – I came up to play on the computer. Patrick’s downstairs with Dad. Did I really scream? Did they hear me? Maybe they called up to me? Is that what woke me up?

I lean over the side of the bed, my head between my knees. Recovery position. Can you recover from nightmares? What is there to recover from? They’re my own imagination. I do it to myself. The human brain is a scary thing when you’re not in control of it.

The door opens slightly and my father’s face appears around it. ‘Everything all right, son?’ He’s drunk. I can tell from the slur in his voice. But he’s happy drunk. Otherwise he wouldn’t be asking if I was OK; he’d be telling me to shut up, to stop being a freak, so stop being such a bloody disappointment to him.

I nod. ‘Yeah. Just . . . got carried away. With a game,’ I say lamely, but he swallows it.

‘We’re just finishing up. Give us a few more minutes.’

‘Whatever. Take as long as you want.’

I can’t look at him, can’t let him see my flushed face, my shaking hands. Always the same nightmares. Sometimes I get the director’s cut, sometimes the edited version. Nothing different about them, though – fear, death, torture. I wonder what my old shrink would make of them.

I pull myself up heavily from the bed. Got to calm down before I go downstairs. I look out of the window. A hundred yards away or so I can see Claire’s room. There’s a light on. That light used to be our signal – Claire used to flash it on and off when her parents had gone to bed and I’d climb out of the window and shin up the drainpipe. We used to talk mainly. She was always very good at listening. We’d listen to CDs too – mostly hers, which were pretty rank in a cheesy kind of way. I’d bring my own round sometimes – try to educate her, try to improve her mind.

Claire was the first person I met when we moved here. I saw her immediately, as soon as I’d got out of the car. Dad told me to wait while the removal van parked, but I saw her out of the window. She was walking right towards us, dawdling like girls do.

I timed it to perfection, waiting for her to be almost next to me before I opened the car door. It nearly knocked her off her feet.

I looked down at the ground; she just looked right at me. That was the thing with Claire – she doesn’t act like normal people. She never seems to have any of the hang-ups.

‘You the ones moving in here?’ she asked, pointing at our house.

I nodded. I was already embarrassed. I was always embarrassed.

‘Are you our new neighbour?’ That was my mum. ‘I’m Chloe and this is William. Will.’

‘I’m Claire,’ Claire said, looking at my mother curiously.

A woman appeared around the corner. ‘Claire!’ she said, her tone exasperated. ‘Here you are. I’ve told you before, do
not
walk away from me like that.’

‘I didn’t walk away,’ Claire said seriously. ‘You were just walking too slowly.’ Even then she wasn’t someone you wanted to get in an argument with.

Funny, I remember that like it happened yesterday too. I have a very good memory. Unnerving, Dad calls it. I remember whole conversations word for word, remember what someone was wearing down to the colour of their tie, remember something that happened years before. Other things I don’t remember at all. There are entire weeks I can’t remember. Sometimes I find myself in places and I can’t remember how I got there, or even how long I’ve been there. Guess that’s just one more thing that makes me a freak.

Later, when Mum and Dad were unpacking, Claire appeared over the fence at the bottom of our garden and encouraged me to climb over. And that, as they say, was that.

The light thing started later on, after my Mum died. Claire knew how cut up I was, and she knew that I couldn’t – wouldn’t – show it. So she used to squeeze my hand secretly sometimes in school. And she said that if I was sad at night, then I could always come over. She’d flash her light every night when her parents had put her to bed and I could come over. If I wanted to. And if her light wasn’t flashing and I wanted to come over anyway, I should coo like a pigeon under her window and if she was awake she’d let me in.

I didn’t think I’d go – I told myself I didn’t need to, didn’t need anything any more. But that very night I saw her light flashing and my heart leapt and I knew I had to go. It was like I was a ship that was about to crash against something, crash really hard, and her bedroom was a lighthouse and if I could just find myself there things might be OK after all.

And she always got it. She never asked stupid questions, never told me everything would be OK, never looked awkward like everyone at school. She just listened and told me what she thought. She said that she thought losing your mother was one of the worst things that could happen, that the fact Mum killed herself made it worse because she didn’t have to die, she chose to. And that was the only time I nearly cried, the whole time, when she said that, because she was right, and that was what hurt the most. My mother left me. She didn’t love me enough to stay.

Claire’s light goes off. Has she gone to bed? It’s still early. Maybe not that early. I don’t know what’s early or late these days. Dad lets me stay up as late as I want so long as I don’t make any noise. I watch out of my window.

There’s someone there. In our garden. Down at the bottom. My heart starts to thud. It’s her. It’s Claire. I press up against the window, open it wide, lean down.

‘Claire! Claire.’ I realise how much I’ve longed to see the flashing light, how much I’ve missed it. I want Claire to bring me in, bring me home. I want to tell her about my nightmares, tell her about seeing Mr Best, about Yan. There’s no one else I can talk to about that stuff.

I can see her – she’s walking towards my window. Something’s different about her. Her hair’s longer. More straggly. Her eyes seem more . . . well, they’re bigger. She looks older, her cheeks more hollow. Her clothes . . .

I feel like I’ve been punched. It isn’t her. Not Claire. It’s one of the freaks. She’s staring up at me with a face full of pain, pain I don’t want, don’t need, can’t take. I shout at her, swear, tell her to leave me alone. I shut the window and fall back on the bed. ‘Leave me alone,’ I sob, knowing that I’m going to have red eyes when I face Patrick, knowing that he’s going to shoot a little look at Dad. ‘You’re in my head. You don’t exist. I don’t want to see you any more . . .’

I grab my pillow and punch it. I need to sort my head out. I’m losing the plot here.

I glance back at Claire’s window; hoping her light would flash – that was just a moment of weakness. I haven’t talked to Claire for ages. The light’s not going to flash again. She’s asleep. She’s someone else now. I’m someone else.

I take a deep breath, heave myself off the bed and go to the bathroom to splash my face with water.

It’s an hour before Patrick comes up. He stands in the doorway for a while. I can feel him watching me but for some perverse reason I pretend I don’t know he’s there. Eventually, he clears his throat and I turn round.

‘Hi,’ I say.

‘Hi, Will. How’s it going?’

I shrug.

He walks into the room, sits down heavily on my bed. ‘So why don’t you tell me what you saw today?’ He says it like he doesn’t really want to listen, like he’s just following protocol, indulging me or something.

I shrug again and spin my chair round to face him. He’s pretty ugly, Patrick. He’s fat and has dark hair and dark eyes. From his father’s side of the family, he says. His mother was Irish and his father was English, and he got the English genes. He says it proudly, as though somehow he got the better deal.

He’s sweating, a thin veil of moisture resting on his face. He takes out a handkerchief and wipes it away.

‘The man was on the street,’ I say. ‘I think he was dead. And Yan was there.’

‘Standing over him with the knife,’ Patrick said, nodding.

I clear my throat. ‘Yeah. I mean, Yan was crouching over him. But I think he was . . . he was trying to help him. He took the knife out. Out of Mr Best.’

Patrick’s eyes narrow. ‘He took out the knife? So you saw him holding the knife when it was in Gary’s body? Mr Best, I mean?’

I nod and frown. ‘I saw him take it out,’ I say again.

Patrick smiles as if to himself. ‘And then what? He was leaning over the body, checking if he was dead?’

‘Trying to help him,’ I say again, less certainly this time.

‘Just tell me what you saw, Will, not how you interpreted it. OK?’

I describe everything I can remember.

Patrick nods. He looks satisfied. ‘It’s a serious crime, murder,’ he says. ‘Might make people around here wake up. Might make them see sense.’

‘See sense?’ I ask.

‘Country’s not what it was, Will. But things are going to change for the better. You just wait and see.’

I nod. I can’t imagine what ‘better’ would look like. Except that the freaks wouldn’t be here any more.

‘Great,’ Patrick says, closing his notebook. ‘Well, I’ll make sure the police get this. Night, Will. You sleep well, OK?’