Voices in the Dark (16 page)

‘Is that a new trick?’ I asked.

‘Uncle taught me, before. Anselm, you’re late like you always used to be.’

‘I’m sorry. I won’t be this year. It was just today; I couldn’t help it.’

She rolled her eyes with an old weariness and picked up her books.

‘Sorry, Jasmine,’ I said. ‘My teacher was lecturing me; I could not get away.’

‘What what she lecturing you about?’

‘Not paying attention. And not losing my way.’

‘Losing your way? What does that mean?’

‘I wish I knew. Come on.’

We set out for home. Our route was the straightest possible; it crossed a patch of waste ground where broken glass clinked under our feet, then came out across the new square. Carriages swept past us on their way north and south, and I kept hold of Jasmine’s hand as we crossed it. At the centre was a statue of the king, and a few traders had broken away from the market and set up at its feet, spreading their goods out on old rugs and rickety tables. Their shouts rose around us, and people argued and picked up the goods restlessly and swore at the traders when they did not like the prices. I stopped at my grandmother’s stall to buy vegetables and bread for dinner.

‘Why doesn’t Jasmine come up and say hello?’ she enquired as she counted out shillings for change.

‘Oh, you know – she’s only small, and the crowds.’

‘That’s as may be,’ said my grandmother. She glanced over at Jasmine and frowned. ‘And where is that friend of yours today?’

‘Who, Michael?’ I said. She knew him well, but she always called him ‘that friend of yours’. ‘He has left,’ I said. ‘He left last week.’

‘Oh?’ she said. ‘Yes, I noticed the shop standing empty. His father was a pawnbroker, wasn’t he?’

I did not answer. The crowds divided us, and I struggled back to where Jasmine was waiting and took her hand. A light rain was beginning. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s go home.’

Jasmine was gazing up at the statue of the king, and she did not hear me. The white stone was streaked with mildew
now, and people had attacked the inscription underneath until it was barely legible.
THE CORONATION OF HIS HIGHNESS KING CASSIUS III
, it read.
JUSTICE
,
INTEGRITY
,
PEACE
. And someone had added words below it.

‘Anselm, what does that end part say?’ Jasmine asked, pointing. ‘Lying … bas … lying bastard? Is that what it says?’

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Jasmine, hell itself will break loose if Grandmama hears you shouting “lying bastard”.’

She laughed and followed me. We ducked under the old barbed wire onto St. Stephen’s Lane. This street was half demolished; the slum housing was supposed to have been rebuilt years ago.

‘I don’t like school,’ remarked Jasmine, balancing along a ruined wall.

‘It’s only been one day, Jas. Why don’t you like it?’

‘Because of my teacher. Stupid Mr Victoire. I can already tell I don’t like him; he’s just like horrible Mrs Simmonds last year.’

‘How can you know already?’

‘He made me sit in the cupboard. There are spiders in there. I felt them crawling in my hair; I swear I did. He said I needed to learn discipline. I know discipline. I just don’t listen to him when he tells me to do something stupid.’

‘He made you sit in the cupboard?’ I demanded.

‘Yes. That’s not one word of a lie.’

‘Wait – come back and tell me properly,’ I said, trying to catch hold of her arm, but she jumped onto an abandoned newspaper stand, then swung round a lamppost, and I could not catch her. ‘I’m the queen of all I survey!’ she proclaimed from halfway up the lamppost.

‘You look more like a monkey to me,’ I said, and made
her laugh and slide down to the ground. ‘But seriously, Jasmine,’ I said, catching her arm. ‘He made you sit in the cupboard? That doesn’t seem right.’

‘It’s not so bad,’ said Jasmine. ‘I like it better in the cupboard, because I don’t have to see his ugly face. Will you carry me home? Listen, let’s pretend I’m a princess and you’re my servant.’

I picked up Jasmine and ran with her. ‘Faster, servant!’ she shouted at intervals as we made our ungainly voyage over the rubble at the end of the street and through the next alley to the end of Trader’s Row. As we raced along the street, Jasmine reached up to catch hold of the flags that were still hanging from the washing lines. They were left there from the end of July, mingled with the washing on the lines. It was the tradition to leave them until the end of September, when the king had formed the first government.

‘Look,’ Jasmine called as we passed the Barones’ shop. ‘Stop, servant! Stop! Someone has moved in.’We stopped to stare in through the window. ‘What are they doing?’ said Jasmine.

Three men in shabby clothes were stripping the old paper from the walls and sawing up planks. Behind the dust on the window, they moved like ghosts in our vision. The old letters on the window,
MICHAEL BARONE
,
JEWELLERS AND PAWNBROKERS FOR FIVE GENERATIONS
, were already half scratched away. A few of the other traders were standing at their shop doorways, watching the three men work. ‘Anselm?’ said Jasmine, and dropped down to the ground again and put her hand in mine. ‘Do you miss Michael?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘You never talk about him.’

‘Did I used to?’

‘Sometimes. And when people go away, you have to talk about them, don’t you? Because that way you keep remembering them, and they aren’t really gone.’

‘Michael hasn’t died, Jas,’ I said.

I watched the nearest workman taking a sledgehammer to the old counter and throwing each dismembered plank into a corner of the room. ‘Can we write him a letter?’ said Jasmine.

‘I don’t know his address. He said he would send it, but he hasn’t. Maybe they are still looking for somewhere else to live.’

‘But what if he doesn’t send it?’

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’

Mr Pascal was standing in the shop doorway, berating Leo over something. He raised his arm to let us under it and went on talking. ‘It is a solid gold venture,’ he was saying. ‘If you don’t make a fortune, I solemnly promise you, you can have everything I make out there in repayment for the inconvenience. You will be rich, North; may God strike me down if I tell a lie.’

Jasmine glanced up at me with a grin. She thought Mr Pascal’s outrageous bargaining the funniest thing on earth.

‘I’ll put the water on to boil for tea,’ I said. Leo nodded. He was listening intently to Mr Pascal, and as we passed him, he kissed Jasmine and ruffled my hair without really noticing us.

‘It would only be until Christmas,’ Mr Pascal continued. ‘Listen, North, this country is as good as occupied already. The economy is a tower of cards. But Holy Island is ruled by no one, and that is where money is to be made. Everyone is going west.’

‘I don’t believe these stories about gold paving the streets of Holy Island,’ said Leo, putting the pieces of an old lamp together with a steady hand. He had his spectacles on. They still looked strange on him, but Leo’s eyesight was deteriorating young, and Father Dunstan had recommended them.

‘They aren’t stories, North. Come on, give me an answer.’

‘I can’t, not just like that.’

‘Well, let me know by the end of the week. One way or the other. I had better go, but don’t forget.’

Leo nodded and raised his hand as Mr Pascal stepped out of the door. ‘It’s all changed next door,’ he remarked from the step. ‘I still can’t get over Barone leaving like that. The shop has been in his family since the first King Cassius. I hope his view of the future turns out to be wrong, or we are all in trouble.’

With that dismal thought, Mr Pascal left us. I put the water on the stove to boil, all the time watching Leo. He carried the lamp carefully to a shelf and set it there on a faded piece of velvet. Then he jammed a cigarette into his mouth and lit it.

‘What was Mr Pascal lecturing you about?’ I asked him.

‘He wants me to go with him to Holy Island for the winter. He’s shutting up his shop to go and trade there; that’s what he says.’

‘But you’re not going to?’ I said. Leo did not answer. He just took the cigarette out of his mouth and exhaled carefully.

It was only then that I heard the silence. The street had been noisy, but now only the birds were singing, and their voices seemed artificially loud and bright. ‘What is it?’ I said. ‘Listen to the silence.’

‘I can hear it too,’ said Jasmine, and ran to the door.

‘Don’t go out there,’ said Leo suddenly. ‘Jasmine, come back here.’

He stepped forward and shot both bolts home. At the same moment, three men in blue uniforms appeared farther up the street, sauntering along with rifles on their shoulders. ‘Jasmine, Anselm, go into the back room,’ said Leo. ‘At once.’

‘No, I want to see,’ said Jasmine.

‘I’m not joking, Jasmine! Go!’

I had not heard Leo shout for as long as I could remember. We both obeyed him. We stood in the doorway of the back room, watching the street, Jasmine leaning forward desperately to try and see. The men were coming this way. They stopped opposite the pharmacist’s, and one of them took out matches. I thought that he was going to light a cigarette. But instead he struck a match and held it up in the still air. Another man took out what looked like a can of paraffin. I bent down, trying to see what they were doing, but they had moved out of my vision.

‘Papa,’ Jasmine murmured once or twice, and Leo said, ‘Shh.’The men marched away down a side alley.

Then there was a roaring hiss, like a stove catching. The men had set light to the nearest flag, and from the way the flames engulfed it, it looked like they had drenched it in paraffin first. The fire was racing along the washing line, burning the pharmacist’s shirts and a stained old blanket. It caught the next flag and leaped towards the sky with a triumphant roar. Trails of paraffin in the dust blazed like spirits. The next washing line caught and burned, and the people out in the street were shrieking and coughing and running for shop doorways. The flags were all catching
now; the man must have thrown the paraffin upwards indiscriminately, drenching everything. The washing lines blazed like cords of fire and crumbled. People ran out with buckets then and threw water from their upstairs windows. The lines fell in a tangle of scorched rope, and the shrivelled remains of the flags went with them. It had all taken less than a minute, and for a long time nothing broke the stunned silence in the street.

People began emerging from their houses at last, though Leo was still holding us back. ‘Could have set the whole house on fire,’ someone was muttering, and someone else said, ‘Bloody fools.’ A baby above the old stationer’s was screaming in outrage. Billy and Joe began parading around with a half-extinguished flag, but the pharmacist slapped them both so hard they staggered. Into the chaos, serene and beautiful, walked my mother. ‘What is all this?’ she said. Then, ‘Leo! Anselm! Jasmine!’

I will not forget her face before she saw us. It was the start of something, that expression, like the reflection of terrors still to come. The look of someone who suddenly saw their family taken from them, torn apart or scattered in what would soon be an open war. Then Leo said, ‘It’s all right; I’m here,’ and she was with us again. Someone, maybe Mr Pascal, tried to turn it into a joke. The siege atmosphere returned. And we pretended that everything would still be all right. But the men had been in blue uniforms; we had all seen it. Those were uniforms I knew well, from pictures in history books. They were the clothes Lucien’s soldiers used to wear.

That night, after the others had gone to bed, a kind of restlessness came over me, and I went down to the shop to
search for evidence of my real father. There must be something, I was certain, some record of his name. I began in the back room, with the drawers of the old desk. But I found no sign there. Only a pile of unpaid bills, and a thousand letters, and a bundle of Jasmine’s drawings. I put them back and carried the lamp with me to the front room.

We had only lived here five years, but in that time, the shop had grown cluttered with half-forgotten objects. In a corner, I unearthed a box of books that Leo had never been able to sell but that he could not stand to part with either, half of them copies of Harold North or old things from before my grandmother was born. I opened a worn-out third edition of
The Sins of Judas
and read the last page. ‘Some things that I have lost I will never find again. Like the river that flows and becomes a different river, I have stepped out of the world and it has gone on without me. And I wish wholeheartedly that I could return and live differently. And I wish I could tell my younger self that it would have been all right.’

When I closed the book, a cloud of dust rose like a phantom and vanished in the draught. Underneath a pile of secondhand clothes, I found a case of letters that Mr Barone had passed on to us. People left them in his shop sometimes, forgotten in the drawers of desks and locked in writing cases. As I turned over the first bundle, moths rose and threw themselves against the glass of the lamp. The quiet whir of their wings went on as I continued to search. In the drawers of the counter were brooches that had lost their jewels, and books without covers, and a china swan with a broken neck, wrapped in newspaper. I found all my school reports, and a lock of Jasmine’s baby hair in a yellowed envelope, and a tarnished ring. The ring made me pause for a moment. But how could it be anything to do with my real
father? He would never have given my mother a sign like this when they were not even married.

Something made the drawer stick, and I had to reach in and pull a sheaf of papers out before I could close it. I hesitated before I put them back. They were not old, and the writing was Leo’s. I held them to the lamp.

'“Once, many years ago,” the lord Rigel began, “there was a boy who wanted more than anything to study magic.”’

That was how the page started, and it made no sense to me. But as I read it, I heard Leo’s tread on the stairs. I moved without thinking. I put the papers back and turned down the lamp.

‘Anselm?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m over here.’