Silent Children (7 page)

"Excuse me, sir, but I don't think I'm the person to ask."

Leslie snorted and covered her mouth, but the revelation of an American accent only enlivened the interrogator. "You people come for the Englishness, don't you? Aren't you here to get away from everything you left at home?"

"Makes sense to me."

"Of course it makes sense," the tweedy man said as though the American had dared to contradict him. "You won't claim you enrich us, will you? Except with tourist money. I'll give you that."

"Me personally? I'm not sure I'd even—"

"Not you personally, but let's take you if you insist," the man said, turning his back on Leslie and Melinda as they managed to interrupt only each other. "You won't have written any"—he flailed at the dance overhead—
"music,
will you?"

"Just a bunch of books."

"Ah, books. Works of American literature. May I ask what kind of a name you've made for yourself and with what?"

"While there was a market for it I wrote horror."

"Most American of you," the tweedy man said, and confronted the women. "Do you feel you must bow to the market too?"

Leslie waited long enough to be sure of sounding calm. "I can't speak for this gentleman, but I think we've had enough of you."

"How surprising," the man said, redder-faced than ever, and held off letting himself out of the shop until he'd prepared an exit line. "Country and western," he protested, baring his teeth at the music, "even worse than jazz." With that he tramped off towards Tottenham Court Road, and Leslie and Melinda gave each other a look that might have led to mirth if the American hadn't broken the silence. "Sorry if I was the cause of that somehow."

"Whatever makes you say that?" said Melinda.

"It seemed like it might be the thing to do."

Leslie was taking in his appearance: grey eyes that looked eager for the unexpected, wide lips poised to smile, long nose that turned up at the end as if to deny some cliché about itself, broad face nearly as right-angled as the red crew cut on top. "I hope we didn't make you feel that way," she said.

"You make me feel just fine."

The women shared a pause before Melinda lifted one eyebrow. "Is that the kind of thing people say in your books?"

"Some do, sure enough."

"And can we ask what becomes of them?"

"Some of them make out okay."

"I can see how they might," Melinda said with the faintest hint of censure, then relented. "Are you here working on a new book?"

"Researching one."

"You'd rather not say any more about it at this stage," Leslie guessed.

"Talk about it too soon and the chances are you never write it," he said, and looked impressed with her perceptiveness.

"Will you tell us your name at least," Melinda said, "in case we've heard of you?"

"I don't believe you will have. Jack Lamb."

"Do you know, I think that does ring some sort of bell. I could almost swear I've seen it on a cover or two recently."

"They'd have to be imported. I'm only published in the States."

"Then maybe we'll see you in print here soon. Leslie, save me from making more of a fool of myself in front of our delightful customer."

"I just wanted to say, Mr. Lamb, that if our window enticed you in we should apologise for everything you had to put up with."

"Your window did, ma'am, but you haven't a thing to apologise for, either of you."

"If you say so. I mean, good, thanks. Is American music your territory?"

"Some. Stuff people like who aren't as expert as you two have to be."

"So what were you looking at before?" Melinda said.

"I don't honestly remember, except trying gave me a headache."

"But you say our window brought you in."

"The notice about the room to let did. I was going to inquire when you started talking about that guy who came in. Would it still be available?"

"Couldn't be more so," Leslie told him. "You're the first to ask."

"You're kidding," he said, so surprised that she couldn't help taking it as a compliment. "I guess you've only just advertised it."

"For most of a fortnight."

"Maybe I'm plain lucky. Would you say it was quiet enough to write in?"

"It certainly is when my son's at school, and if you need it to be when he's there he'll have to use his headphones."

"It's a room in your house."

"A big bedroom, that's right." His gaze was lingering on her, and she felt absurdly in danger of blushing. "There's plenty of space for a desk if you need it," she said.

"Would it be okay for me to view it soon?"

"Perhaps I should tell you about the house first."

"Why don't you do that when I've seen it and got the feel of it. I like to keep my first impressions innocent. Comes with the job."

"Nothing wrong with a bit of innocence now and then, is there, Leslie? You could take Mr. Lamb now if you want and I'll lock up."

No glance at Melinda was needed to confirm she was hoping Leslie might acquire more than just a lodger. When Leslie thanked her, Melinda had the grace to keep her astuteness out of her smile, but there was no mistaking what she continued to think. "See you tomorrow," Leslie said firmly enough, she hoped, to put paid to any misplaced romantic notions. Right now it was sufficient that, as she emerged into the crowd with her new acquaintance, whom she didn't think she would mind having both as a friend and a tenant, she no longer felt watched.

They had almost reached Shaun's when he shouted at Ian. "Our Crys wants to see in your house."

"Wants to lie on the floor in the kitchen," Baz improvised at the top of his voice, "and stick her ear on it and listen to the worms."

"Wants to see the kid's head come up out of your sink," yelled Stu.

They were having to bellow because Shaun lived on the North Circular Road. Ian might have objected to how they nearly always ended up at Shaun's, where the traffic noise and the smell of petrol followed you into the house, if Shaun didn't have most of their good ideas. Baz stole a magazine from just inside a different Soho sex shop every weekend and hadn't been grabbed once, Stu had already dropped acid several times and said things like "Where's the fucking focus on this thing?" while he clutched at the sides of his head, but it was Shaun whose right cheek bore the scar from shoving his face through the glass of a bus shelter when he was twelve to show a gang he wasn't scared of anything they could do to him. "Let's show her," Ian hollered.

A lorry several times the size of Shaun's house rattled the insecure glass of the windows as Shaun stabbed the lock with his key on a chain with a skull. Ian was first after him into the token hall, where they had to sidle past a bicycle with one wheel missing and some bits of the furniture Shaun's father kept attempting to build so that he would have another kind of job to try for. Baz heeled the door shut as they followed Shaun into the front room, where shabby chairs faced a television crowned with a video recorder and cable box. The furniture left space only for a plasterboard bar in one corner, where three bottles of spirits hung their heads on the wall. On top of the bar a quartet of crumpled empty cans of Skol guarded the corners of a car repair manual bristling with yellow slips of paper. The boys had hardly thrown themselves into a chair each as Shaun set about switching channels when his big sister Sharon appeared from the kitchen, pushing seven-year-old Crystal ahead of her. "Someone let her sit before she spills her juice," Sharon shrilled, and more directly to her brother "They haven't kept you back at school for once, then, so I needn't rush to work."

"Don't know what you'd have to rush for. They must be hard up, anyone who'd pay to watch you wag your arse on a table."

"Never mind joking someone who's got a paying job, Shaun Nolan." Since she'd ducked to pat her elaborately careless heap of blonde hair in front of the mirror above the electric fire, she appeared to be addressing herself. "You wait till you finish school and you're out of work like dad."

"At least he doesn't have men looking up his arse, and I won't either."

"We'll see, won't we. Turn that down and let her sit before she stains her dress, and you've got to stay in with her till mum gets home." Without waiting to see if any of this was likely to be obeyed, Sharon stalked out ahead of her hot spicy perfume and was gone with a slam.

Baz shoved himself out of his chair, writhing his shoulders as if someone might need to be punched. "Sit here," he told Crystal. "We don't want you messing your pretty white dress."

Stu looked at the ceiling and found nobody there to observe his grin. "Not yet," he added.

"Just park your arse there, Crys, and finish that," Shaun said, flicking through the channels.
Crackpot Jackpot
flashed by, and
Driving Me Crazy
with its harassed clown of a driving instructor, and a talk show in which teenagers were screaming and bleeping at their weepy obese parents while an audience howled and catcalled to prove themselves normal. When Crystal glimpsed
Hocus Focus
and the camera that magicked its owner into the scenes of its old photographs, she perched on the vacated chair before Baz could reclaim it and began to wail. "Put it back on. Mum says you have to let me see my programmes."

Shaun switched the television off and aimed the control at his sister as though it might work for her too. "Shut that. Do it, bitch. Leave your drink if you aren't going to finish it or you won't get your surprise."

The instant he stopped speaking Crystal's tears brought themselves to an end, reminding Ian of the girl he was expected to think of as some kind of sister. "What is it?" Crystal sniffed.

"Wouldn't be a surprise then, would it? It's at Ian's."

She downed half her blackcurrant juice so that its place in her plastic mug could be taken by a hollow gasp. "She said I can't go out."

"Shar did, but she's not here. Now you have to do what I say or you'll never know what your surprise was going to be."

She hadn't asked to visit Ian's house at all, and Ian might have been angry with Shaun for trying to deceive him, except that all four of them often said things the others were supposed either to know weren't entirely true or to find out soon enough. "It's special," he said. "It'll make you special."

He knew that would get to her—it might have done so to him. He felt contempt for them both, a contempt that squashed his thoughts. When Crystal emptied her mug, daubing her mouth with purple juice, he grabbed her plump warm sticky hand for as long as it took to pull her out of the chair. "Wipe it," Shaun said in disgust, and Ian felt as if he were obeying as he rubbed his hand dry on his trousers while Crystal smeared her wrist with her mouth.

The noise of the traffic swallowed the slam of the front door. The boys marched in single file across the road, Crystal in the middle of them with her hands over her ears to shut out the screech of brakes and furious blaring of horns, and into the park, a lot of green with some muddy water cutting through it, and kids walking home across it, and people taking their dogs for a shit. The slab on top of Ian's mind made his surroundings mean less than nothing to him, and sometimes he wondered if his friends felt that way too, not that he was about to ask. They crossed the park so fast that Crystal had very little breath to wail about how much further they were going, but when they reached the gates she stopped to look maltreated. "Hurry up," Shaun said, and when that didn't shift her, "or you won't see your new friend."

"What friend?"

"A special little girl," Ian offered, and felt a flicker of excitement reach beneath the slab as Shaun said "She wants to play with you."

Not much was happening in the streets. Kids with keys were letting themselves in, and cartoons were uttering short bursts of words together with a good deal more noise beyond quite a few of the sets of net curtains, but otherwise the houses were keeping their occupants to themselves. The boys had hurried Crystal almost to Jericho Close when a white Astra, its back seat heaped with bags of food, cruised past them and stopped with a gnash of the handbrake. The driver's window slid down to extrude the grey curls and then the crimson-lipped determinedly tanned remainder of the head of Mrs. Lancing, who lived in the corner house. "Ian," she said.

It wasn't a greeting so much as a summons. "What?" he just about responded.

"Is that the little one who was making all the fuss outside your house the other day?"

"No."

"I hope you won't be upsetting her the way you did the other little girl."

"Right."

"What do you mean by that, Ian? Just you wait until I've finished speaking," Mrs. Lancing called after him. He grinned at hearing her voice rise only to find it hadn't quite enough breath, but he was even more pleased by how her comments must have improved his friends' opinion of him, though they couldn't question him in case that put Crystal off. Instead they followed him down Jericho Close to his house.

Everyone but him stayed behind Crystal on the narrow path as he twisted the key in the lock. When he turned from pushing the door open, however, she had retreated a step and was tugging at her right-hand bunch of hair with one sticky fist. "Where is she?" she complained.

"She can't come to the door. I said she was special."

"What's wrong with her?" said Crystal, her mouth on the way to drooping, one sandal digging at the path. "Can't she walk?"

"She's just asleep. You've got to wake her."

"Why can't you?"

"She doesn't like boys to," Ian said, and saw his ingenuity impressing his friends. As soon as Crystal ventured forward, almost leaving the sandal with its toe stuck in a jagged crack of the path, he said "Come on and I'll show you her room."

Crystal hesitated with one foot over the threshold. He saw Stu think of pushing her into the house, and looked at him hard enough to prevent it. "Why did the woman in the car say the little girl made a fuss?" Crystal said.

"About coming in a house she didn't know, just like you. She's used to me and my mum now. She likes it here just like you will."