Silent Voices Page 18

  “A weekend that felt like an hour,” said Simon. “Remember that little fact? I do. When we came out of there, it seemed like we’d only been inside for an hour, but it had been two days. Two whole fucking days. I still don’t have that time back – do you?”

  Brendan shook his head. “Okay, yes. I do remember that. It’s the thing that scares me most about the whole thing, those lost days. Where did it go? I mean, what the hell did we do for all that time? What did he do to us?”

  “And who, or what, is he?” Simon pushed away from the table, suddenly uncomfortable within the walls of the old pub. “Let’s get out of here. The quicker we find out where Marty might be, the better for us all. Having that tough bastard with us will make everything seem a bit less oppressive.”

  “Yeah, okay.” Brendan stood, pushing back his chair. “Let’s go. We have an appointment to keep with an old lady and a pot of tea. She might even have cake.” He smiled, and it almost reached his eyes.

  Almost.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  MARTY SAT ON his sofa with the blinds closed. The noise of the city – the busy quayside traffic, the lunchtime crowds surging towards pubs and cafes for their salads and panini and plates of antipasto – dimmed to nothing but background noise.

  The television was on, tuned to a twenty-four-hour news channel, but he had the sound turned right down. A woman with shiny blonde hair and impressive bone structure mouthed banalities that he had no desire to hear. He stared at her face, at her flawless skin, and imagined it peeling back to show the bone beneath. For some reason, that made him smile.

  Marty was stretched out, with his legs trailing on the floor, and he was wearing only a pair of baggy gym shorts. His torso was bare. He was sweating; his skin glistened, as if he had been sprayed with water. In one hand he held a whisky bottle, and in the other he had the acorn. He was rubbing the surface of the nut with his fingers, polishing it, making it shine. It was a reflexive action, something to use up his nervous energy.

  He took a long swig directly from the bottle. The whisky was good stuff: Talisker, his favourite. The liquor burned all the way down his throat, a golden trail of soft pain that sliced right through him.

  His stab wound was aching.

  He had taken off the dressing to give it some air. The stitches had already started to come loose, fraying like the hem of an old shirt, and he had been bleeding again. There were balled up paper tissues on the floor near his feet, stained red. The bleeding seemed to have stopped for the time being, but the place where he’d been stabbed felt raw, as if it might burst open at any minute. That bastard Doc; he didn’t have a clue, had done a botch job when he’d stitched up the cut. But Marty couldn’t go to a hospital, because they’d ask awkward questions. Stab wounds had to be reported to the police – it was the law. And that would create all kinds of problems.

  He rolled the acorn around with his fingers, and dropped it onto his tight stomach.

  With his other hand, he put the whisky bottle down on the sofa, leaning it against a cushion, and grabbed the remote control. He flicked through the channels, but saw nothing to interest him. Daytime television was appalling; it made him angry. Sensationalist intervention shows with career-choice chavs taking lie-detector tests to prove if they were the fathers of grasping brats to appease women who were aged before their time and desperate to hang onto something, however vulgar. Property programmes with smug middle-class city-types renovating old houses they’d snapped up in repossession auctions. Quizzes made by and for the mentally subnormal. Panel shows featuring faded soap stars and ex-cruise ship singers scrabbling at the foot of the broadcasting table for the scraps of one final meal before they were carted off like old horses, to have their sagging tits and prolapsed vaginas turned into glue.

  “Jesus,” he said, surprised at the anger in his thoughts, the absolute venom coming through from somewhere. He knew that he was furious because of the stabbing, and the way the fight had ended, but this was something different. He had not felt this kind of pure, incandescent rage for a long time – not since the accident that had cut short his dreams of a career in boxing. It made him light-headed. The anger was so uncut, so undiluted, that it felt like the prelude to some kind of sexual thrill.

  He closed his eyes and saw her face. Sally: the girl who’d been killed all those years ago, when he was nineteen. He had loved her, or at least he’d thought so then, when everything was so uncertain, especially his feelings. But she had been young and pretty, and knew how to handle him. She had possessed the softest hands he’d ever known.

  Sally had been riding pillion on the Suzuki, her arms wrapped around his stomach, her chin resting against the back of his shoulder. They’d been racing out into the Northumbrian countryside, just looking for a space to call their own for a while, a quiet spot to lie down on the grass and cuddle. Night was gathering in the sky, chasing the lowering sun, but there was still enough light to see clearly. The road had been straight, and lined with low dry stone walls on either side. They had an unobstructed view of flat green fields, and in the distance craggy outcroppings rose like the backbone of some half-buried beast. It was all so beautiful... just like the girl, like Sally.

  Marty had not been driving too fast, not really: possibly a few miles per hour over the speed limit, but it was nothing that he couldn’t handle. He felt in complete control of the Suzuki; its master. It was just another part of the beauty of that early evening.

  Then, without warning, he’d seen it come stumbling out from the right, padding along on those ghastly oversized hand-feet into the middle of the road, where it turned to face him, its awful mouth growing wider and wider as it waited for him to arrive....

  Humpty Dumpty.

  The same hideous figure he’d dreamt of when he was a kid, and then seen for real the night he and his three friends had lost all those hours inside the Needle. It was a part of his life that he’d tried to block out, and Sally was helping with that. She helped him see light beyond the darkness, a faint glimmer that grew stronger every day that they spent with each other.

  She was the light. It was part of her purpose, to make him see the candle she held out for him.

  Even now, years after the event, he had no idea why he’d tried to turn the wheel. The rational side of him said that he must have been trying to turn into the path of the thing, to mow it down and kill it. But another part of him, the side that was and would forever remain a rotten coward, told him that he was trying to turn away, to dodge a collision with the creature from his nightmares in case it managed to grab hold of him.

  He lost control of the bike. It skidded off the road, hitting a fallen section of wall, the victim of bad weather and escapee sheep. The tumbled, moss-coated stones acted as a ramp, and the bike took flight. They landed badly on the other side, at the bottom of a slope. Sally’s injuries were fatal: she took a short time to die, and was barely conscious all the while. Marty lay pinned beneath the Suzuki and the corpse of the girl he could have loved forever, until somebody came along and noticed them there.

  “Sally,” he whispered now, in the soft, false darkness of the room. “I’m so, so sorry.” He grabbed the whisky and took a hit. He blamed the heat of the drink for the tears that dampened his cheeks.

  And how many women had there been since Sally, ones that could never live up to her ghost, no matter how hard they tried? Indeed, the fact that they tried counted against them, because Sally never had. She’d just trusted in the fact that he cared for her, and never pushed, never forced anything. Or was that just him glorifying her memory, romanticising her?

  There had been scores of such women. Of that he could be certain. He’d never counted – he wasn’t that vain – but he did know that he’d long passed the century mark. Over a hundred pairs of open legs, smooth, taut bellies, open mouths, needy eyes, and hands that were never quite as soft as the ones he sometimes dreamt about. That meant over a hundred minds that he’d barely taken the time to get to know, and it was his loss, be
cause some of them had been good people, intelligent women who were drawn to him for reasons of their own. He’d just never been emotionally invested enough to care. There’d been the slags and sluts, of course: empty one-night stands used as a way of beating back the darkness, but only a few. There had also been women who, if he were not so damaged, he could have fallen in love with. Like Melanie, the girl he’d dumped the other day. She was good-looking, interesting, had an incisive wit... but still he had started ignoring her calls, wishing her away. Stepping back from whatever it was she had to offer.

  None of these women had held a candle, lighting his way along the dark path. Only Sally had ever done that.

  He was absently rolling the acorn between his palm and his stomach, moving it across his belly. It was smooth and cold, like a cold compress. The pressure, when he applied it close to his wound, eased the pain. It felt good, like a balm. He pressed it against the stitches, rolling it over the area where the knife had torn through his skin and penetrated his body.

  The motion of the acorn, and the pressure it produced, also took away his rage, the dark thoughts of a past that could not be changed. His mind began to feel empty; the bad stuff was being siphoned off, like blood through a catheter.

  A soft humming sound grew in his ears, and Marty looked up, at the window, but no shadows moved beyond the drawn shades. The humming turned gradually into another sound, something that made him feel uneasy all over again, despite the acorn’s movement across his belly. A quiet clicking noise, like hard nails drumming against plastic or playing cards flicked right beside his ear. Marty rolled onto his side and stumbled off the sofa, falling to his knees and then rising to his feet, adopting a defensive stance. His fists were clenched; his hands were raised. He was ready to fight... always, always ready to fight, whenever the need arose.

  The sound faded, as if it were moving away from him, perhaps along a dark, deserted corridor inside a ruined tower block. Briefly he smelled the sap of summer trees, felt a light breeze blowing against his naked torso, and heard distant cries, like twisted birdsong.

  He was safe. He wasn’t there, inside the Needle. He was safe and sound and prepared for action, within walls that were concrete, yes, but much newer, and not as haunted as the ones from before – the old, grey concrete walls that still surrounded his soul, cutting it off from daylight. Making it so that he could not see Sally’s candle; would never see it again, even in dreams.

  Marty relaxed, letting his hands drop to his sides. He had to coax his fists to open, but they obeyed him. He sat back down on the sofa and picked up the bottle. Took a large swallow.

  He felt around on the sofa for the acorn, experiencing a sudden desire for the security it had provided. He could not find it anywhere, not on the surface of the cushions, or down the back or sides of the cushions. He raised his hands to his head and scratched his scalp, rubbing his temples as he moved his hands across his skull. Looking down, wondering if the acorn had in fact dropped onto the floor, he noticed a small lump in his abdomen.

  Time slowed down, stopped. The image of the television seemed to freeze, but when he glanced at it the picture began to move again, as if mocking him.

  He looked down again, at his body.

  His torso.

  At the lump. In his belly.

  The lump was positioned to the left of his navel, not too far from the knife wound (what had that fume-stinking old sawbones called it, a loin wound?). The lump was large, almost the size of a golf ball but more oval in shape. It stretched the skin around it taut, making it pale and thin-looking.

  Marty reached down and patted the area around the lump. There was no pain, not even minor discomfort. It was as if the area had gone numb from some kind of anaesthetic. The kind you might receive before minor surgery, given to you by a heavy-breathing medic in a face mask.

  He knew what it was, of course. Marty was a lot of things, but he wasn’t stupid.

  It was the acorn.

  Somehow the acorn had got... inside him. It had entered his body.

  He looked at the wound. The stitches had come undone. There was no blood; the wound was perfectly dry. To him, in that moment, its inner edges looked like the labia of some mutant vagina; the pink inside was the interior of a woman’s genitals. He had no idea why he was thinking this way, but the image would not shift. He was stuck with it.

  Suddenly, as he watched, the acorn began to move. Inching its way along inside his torso, towards his navel, it rolled like a slow-witted dung beetle. Again, there was no pain. He felt nothing, nothing at all. It was as if he had been cut off from all the nerves in his body below the shoulders and above the pelvis: everything between these points was vague, like something that didn’t quite belong to him. It was like dreaming awake, caught in that idle moment between sleeping and waking, when the two states bleed into each other to become something entirely different. It wasn’t unpleasant... not really. He found himself fascinated by the slow-rolling movement beneath his skin, and the way the skin itself stretched like elastic to accommodate the travelling seed.

  The acorn stopped moving.

  Marty felt bereft. He realised that he’d enjoyed the sight of it shifting across his abdomen. He reached down and flicked it gently, and just the once, to encourage it to move again.

  The acorn responded.

  It rolled across his stomach, causing his navel to protrude as it passed beneath the recessed pink knot (he was always so oddly proud of being an ‘outy’ rather than an ‘inny’), and round towards his opposite flank. The acorn disappeared then, under his body, but he was aware of its presence under the skin of his back. He still could not feel the acorn, but he knew that it was still in motion, as if some previously hidden sense was tracking it around his body.

  Marty knew that he should be worried, perhaps even frightened, by what was happening to him, but he could not summon the energy to react in this way. He watched as the acorn completed its slow circuit, passing under the wound – making those labial folds purse and open like a kiss – and then back to its starting point to the left of his navel.

  “Wow,” he said, feeling drunk on the experience. “Fucking hell.”

  He reached down again and placed the end of his index finger against the conical top of the acorn. Then, without even considering what kind of damage he might be doing to his insides, Marty pressed down on the seed.

  The acorn sank into his belly, vanishing into the yielding flesh. The skin popped back to its natural shape, and there was no evidence of the acorn ever having been there, beneath the surface of Marty Rivers, under his demented skin.

  He blinked and looked up at the window. The blind was glowing white, like a screen, from the sunlight behind. What was happening to him? He felt like he’d just woken up from a long sleep. Had he been dreaming? Surely what he thought he’d experienced could not be real. It was impossible. A hallucination.

  He looked down at his flat belly, and then at the dry wound. Everything looked fine.

  But deep down, despite the fact that he did not want to listen, a small, scared voice – his ten-year-old self – was whispering: It wasn’t a dream. You were awake. This is really happening. Clickety-clickety-click.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THE OLD WOMAN lived on Grove Terrace, in a house that backed onto Beacon Green. Simon could remember Marty going there for lunch every Sunday – a big roast, with Yorkshire puddings and all the trimmings. His parents would never have made such a meal. In Marty’s house, it was always whatever came out of a can served with bread – French toast on a weekend, as a little treat.

  Brendan knocked on the door, rapping three times with his knuckles. There did not seem to be a doorbell, or even a knocker. The front garden was small and neat, with well-tended borders and a lawn that was cropped as short as a football pitch. The house number was painted on the wall to the left of the door in white emulsion.

  “I hope she’s home.” Simon glanced at Brendan.

  “She said she would be,” said
Brendan, fidgeting with the buttons at the neck of his shirt. He looked uncomfortable, as if he were in pain, or perhaps his clothes didn’t quite fit him properly. Whatever the cause of his consternation, it was making him fidget in a way that looked exhausting.

  “You okay?”

  Brendan stopped fidgeting. “Aye, I’m fine. Why?” He didn’t make eye contact.

  Simon sensed something, a kind of reluctance on Brendan’s part to reveal what was wrong with him. “It’s just, well, you seem a little off. You know, like you’re hurting or something. You keep wincing, and you’re pulling at your clothes. The shirt, the jacket.”

  Brendan shook his head. “No, mate. It’s nothing. I have a rash, that’s all. Jane started using some new kind of washing powder – it was on sale. I think I’m allergic.” Still he did not meet Simon’s gaze.

  “Oh. Right. That explains it.” Simon shrugged, took a step back, and glanced along the road, then back at the front door. “Where is she?”

  As if on cue, the door opened. A small, well-dressed old woman stood in the hallway, peering over the rims of her spectacles. “Hello,” she said. “You must be... Marty’s old friends?”

  “Yes,” said Brendan. “We spoke on the phone earlier. I’m Brendan, and this is Simon. Thanks again for sparing us some of your time.” He smiled but it looked like he was grimacing.

  The old woman grinned, showing her gleaming dentures. Her face was weathered, crosshatched with creases and wrinkles, but she had the demeanour of someone a lot younger. “Oh, when you get to my age all you have is time. It might be nice to spend some of it today with a couple of good-looking young men.” Clearly she still had a sharp mind.

  Still smiling, she stepped aside, turned, and walked down the hallway.