The One Safe Place (25 page)

"Doing what?"

"That's right, never say yes to any fucker till you know what you're saying yes to. Just go on the pavement and keep an eye out for the filth while we bring some stuff in, will that do you?"

"What sort of stuff?"

"Never mind what sort. You can't tell nobody if you don't know, right? Go on, lad, move your arse."

"If Uncle Bernard says."

"Uncle Bernard wouldn't fucking be here if he didn't, would he? Jesus, tell him, Bern."

"It's all right, Darren. Phil won't mind."

Darren seldom knew what his father would or wouldn't mind from one moment to the next, but at least this time it would have been Bernard who got it wrong. He stepped out of the house as Barry, a wiry man whose grey scalp looked scraped and whose left cheek bore a scar which began near his eye and interrupted the end of his patchy moustache, heaved the garden fence upright so as to drag the gate wider on the concrete. Darren plugged his ears with his headphones and saw Bernard mouthing at him beyond the hiss the tape had come to. He had to pull the headphones down before he realised he was being told to do that and to go across the road to keep watch.

Above him the sky was dark, but behind the low houses was a sediment of blue which made the roofs look razor-edged. Several windows were unsteady with the flickering of televisions, and one was blazing all the colours of disco lights. If anyone was watching as Bernard and Barry unloaded piles of cartons from the back of the old retired Post Office van and hurried in and out of the house like animals stocking a nest, the watchers were staying well out of sight, and Darren was certain they wouldn't dare call the police. He heard a siren racing closer on the main road, but it was an ambulance heading into Manchester. "They'll be sending one for you if you fuck with us," he muttered, glaring at the windows that were dark, seeing the unsteadily illuminated windows shake with fear of him.

He couldn't have been standing on the pavement long, though long enough for his hands and feet to start growing cold as they did whenever he took a trip, when he saw Barry loitering in the doorway of the house, mopping his forehead with the sleeve of his hooded grey shirt. "What's he waiting for, Bern, the filth to come along and ask him what he's up to? Get your arse over here, lad."

It wasn't his house. He wasn't Darren's father. Darren stalked across the road, reaching for his headphones as he passed the van. Only the van wasn't quite the size or shape he'd thought it was, nor was it exactly where it had seemed to be, and he couldn't tell if the road around him was lit or dark. A barking in a yard very close to him sounded like somebody—maybe a policeman—imitating a dog, and the hiss of the headphones was trying to drag him down, to rise above his head and drown him. He'd be all right once he reached the house, but the doorway at the end of the elongated path appeared to be shrinking away from him like a picture on a television which had that moment been switched off. Barry had turned away, and Darren couldn't call to him for help, because the inside of his head had been scooped out, tongue and all. Then the image of the house steadied as if someone had used a remote control, and the prickly lumps of meat in his shoes carried him over the doorstep.

Barry and Bernard seemed not to see anything wrong with him when they bothered to look at him, but he couldn't decide if they were pretending, nor whether it was hot or cold in the house. It must be hot, because Barry was saying, "I could murder a lager now, me."

"Phil keeps some in the fridge sometimes, if the lad or his mam haven't finished it off."

Barry swaggered down the hall and grabbed a can from the refrigerator. He ripped off the metal tab and threw it among the greasy plates in the kitchen sink, and tossed the can and his head back as he made for the front room. "Jesus, lad," he said, wiping his moustache with a thumb and forefinger, "don't you ever turn the telly off?"

"My mam always has it on."

"Don't want to grow up like a tart, do you? Don't want your da coming home to find you in a fucking dress."

"Tell you what, Barry, why don't you take the drink with you while you move the van."

"And what'll you be doing, Bern?"

"I'll hang on till Marie comes home and I can straighten things out with her."

"I hope Phil appreciates what you're doing, pal."

"Reckon he will, pal," Bernard said, and Darren wondered if he was going to punch Barry in the face, a possibility that brought his surroundings into much sharper focus. But the men seemed to have made themselves clear to each other, because Barry slouched down the path to the van, tossing his head to feed himself another drink. "Better at thieving than he is at doing as he's told, that's his trouble," Bernard remarked. "Do us a favour, lad, do you have to have it on that loud?"

He was in the front room now, searching for the remote control among the clothes and bills and free newspapers strewn over and around the chairs which were all that remained of various different suites. "Like a bloody jumble sale, this house. Come ahead, lad, give us the switch and let's have a bit of peace."

Darren saw the control on the black marble mantelpiece above the electric fire into which his mother had stuffed some bills. Barry had said he was the man of the house while his father was inside, which meant he could have the set on as loud as he liked, so why should he let Bernard tell him to turn it down? Then Bernard noticed where he was looking, and grabbed the control and poked at the buttons, switching from police knocking people down with batons to a man making a woman stand on tiptoe with a broken bottle at her throat to a cowboy being shot six times to some soldiers marching past a dead baby, until he located the off button at last. "Don't tell me you were watching any of that," he said, and sat down.

He'd gone for the least cluttered chair, on which Darren's mother had abandoned the cardigan she'd been wearing earlier. As he leaned back Darren felt as if the man was flattening his mother. He groped under his ears to get rid of the hiss that kept merging with Bernard's voice, then remembered he had to switch off the Walkman, and did so. "I wanted to see if Ken and Dave were on again."

"They ought to be soon, right enough. Just remember they're family, lad, not some kind of Yankee thriller."

"I only wanted to see what the telly was saying about them."

"All right, lad, it isn't you I'd like to give a thumping." Bernard reached into his suede jacket and produced an object whose glinting seemed to promise Darren the present of a weapon, but it was only a tin of cigars. "Find us an ashtray, will you? Where's the one you lifted from the Dog & Gun?"

Darren went into the back room where the men of the family met. Whenever he found an excuse to join them, like taking them a packet of cigarettes or food they'd sent him out for, they would discuss him loudly for a few moments and then look at him as though he'd already been told to get out. Now he was able to stand as long as he wanted to, inhaling the memory of cigarette smoke and feeling he owned the room, the built-in bar with hula dancers printed on it, the boxing posters with his father's name inserted on each of them, the loose floorboard hiding the gun which had replaced the one his father had thrown in the canal, the piles of cartons of video cameras which Barry and Bernard had brought in. He didn't know how long he had been standing when Bernard shouted, "Get a move on, lad. I'm gasping."

The only ashtray Darren could see, on the low table whose glass top imprisoned six poker hands with the winner in front of his father's chair, was stuffed with butts and ash. He climbed on a chair and had to thump the narrow transom with both hands until it gave enough for him to empty the ashtray onto the strip of grass alongside the house. He hauled the transom shut and forced the holes in the bar onto the metal struts, and jarred the softness inside his head as he jumped down and walked along the hall into Bernard's stare. "Sweet jogging Jesus, it took you long enough. I thought you were doing a runner."

"Just cleaning this for you."

"Out of the window and out of sight, eh? You take after your mam in some ways right enough." Bernard bit off the end of the cigar jerking in his mouth and spat a fingertip without a nail and some blood which Darren had to tell himself was only stained saliva into the ashtray, and clanked his Zippo open and shut, and puffed out smoke and closed his eyes and leaned his head back like an actor advertising cigars; then he squinted through his cloud at Darren. "How much longer are you going to prowl about, lad? Find something to do for the love of Christ, it's like being in a zoo. Put on the telly if you must, if that'll keep you still."

Darren slung some of his mother's dresses off a chair and hunched his body so that it had to sit down. "You said they won't be on yet."

Bernard eyed him over the flare of red. "Try not to let all this upset you, lad. That bloody Yank's been taken care of good and proper, any road." He clamped his teeth on the cigar, and his anger came out thick as the smoke. "Putting your da in the paper and making him look like that, the bastard got what was coming to him. Pulling a gun on the boys because he couldn't take his medicine and getting them arrested. What were they supposed to do, I'd like to know?" He glared at Darren, who felt held responsible and unable to think of a safe answer, until at last the cigar lit like a bulb outside a studio. "He should have taken himself and his family back where they came from while he had the chance."

"Do you think they'll go back now?"

"They will if they know what's good for them. There's sod all to keep them here. What's it to you anyway, lad?"

Darren saw the newscast so clearly it might still have been on the television instead of just on the end of the tape with the woman and the dog: the pavement outside the bookshop roped off like a boxing ring with the loser's blood splashed over it, the woman and the boy in his posh school uniform, their eyes leaking as though they were acting the kind of scene he would either laugh at or fast-forward in a film. All at once he realised he'd seen what he needed to see. Bernard was staring at him, and Darren was about to dodge out of the room to control his expression in case it betrayed him when he heard a key in the front door. "Here's mam."

"Aye, and a pig on the roof."

By the sound of it she was trying to jiggle the wrong key into the lock. Darren watched Bernard throw his hands about impatiently while the metallic scraping faltered, and keys jangled against the door, and the scraping became more urgent, and at last the door banged open. "What a stink," his mother said at the top of her voice. "Can't he go anywhere without a cigar stuck in his gob? I wouldn't care if it was just a ciggy. When did he go, Darren? Did he want me?"

"No chance, love."

Since Bernard was pushing his lips forward along the cigar, making a face like the gargoyle on the church Darren had broken into last year and not found much except to smash, the response was barely audible. "He's in here, mam," Darren yelled.

"Sneaky sod," his mother said, not low enough, and yelled back, "Tell him to wait. I'm off upstairs."

"She says—"

"Shut it, lad. I'm not deaf, even if you are with those things forever stuck on your head."

Darren told himself he wasn't deaf either, though the world always seemed too quiet when he took off the Walkman. He heard his mother use the toilet in the bathroom, where the door had never shut properly since his father had kicked the bolt off to get to the toilet while Darren was in the shower. He heard his grandfather crying out feebly, "Who's that? They're getting in," and his mother shouting, "It's only me," then having to add "Marie" and "Phil's wife" and "Your son, you useless mong." The toilet flushed, and Darren heard her tapping her way rapidly to her room like two blind men, and then her different footsteps came downstairs. She'd exchanged her high heels for slippers, but was still wearing her short tight red dress and a faceful of makeup. "You look like you've been having a good time," Bernard said.

"You're joking, aren't you? They might as well have locked me up with Phil for all the fun I've had since they put him away."

"I reckon someone had some, any road. I hope you made yourself a good few bob."

"You wouldn't grudge me, would you, Bern? You promised Phil you'd see me right. You don't want him having to bother about that on top of everything else."

Bernard stared away the threat she intended him to hear and dealt the cigar a tap which made its grey head fall off into the ashtray. "Money short, is it, Marie? I don't see why with Phil having his board and lodging paid for him."

"You try running a house by yourself for a while. Maybe you don't realise the gas and the leccy and the rest of them send people like us the final demand when they've not sent the bill in the first place. We're down here and everyone else wants to keep us here with not enough to live on less we go begging to the social. I lie awake at night trying to figure where the money goes."

"I wonder," Bernard said, keeping his gaze on her while he converted half an inch of his cigar to smoke and ash. "So you'll be glad of owt that comes your direction, I reckon."

"Long as it's safe."

"The idea's meant to be you keep it that way. It better had be even with Phil gone," Bernard said, and Darren wondered whom his tone was intended to menace: maybe everyone outside the family. "The latest lot's in the back. Good job the lad was here to take care of us. Me and Barry will be round again once we've got the best deal."

"Darren can let you in if I'm not here."

"Don't you go keeping him off school all the time, Marie. Last thing we want is buggers snooping round any of our houses. Here, give us Phil's keys and I can let myself in whenever I need to."

"Da gave me them," Darren protested.

"Aye, well, he must have forgot to tell you to give them to me. Hand them over, lad, don't piss me about. Your mam'll just have to make sure she's here when you come home from school. My mam always was."

Darren dug a hand into his trousers and clenched his fist around the keys. They felt much solider to him than anything else in the room, and he held onto them until his mother cried, "Give them to your uncle when he tells you. Sometimes I don't know who he thinks he is, Bern. I'll belt him if he doesn't give you them, or you can."