The Returners Page 4

  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?’

  g

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The following morning I wake, like I always do, feeling like I haven’t slept. At least I didn’t dream again last night. Two lots of night terrors in twenty-four hours would have been harsh.

  I stumble out of bed. My curtains are still open – I find my eyes flickering over to Claire’s house; her curtains are closed. I look away.

  I’m feeling rough. Slightly nauseous. I think of the night before, of Patrick telling me things were going to change for the better. How? I should have asked. How will they be better?

  I pull on some clothes half-heartedly. School day. Great. Just what I need. More rules, more people telling me what to do, stupid imposed routines. When I complained about it to Dad, he just grinned. Wait till you’ve got a job, he said. Wait till you’re on the nine-to-five conveyor belt. Then you’ll know about pointless rules. Then you’ll know about routine.

  I wander into the bathroom and brush my teeth.

  I have an uncomfortable feeling in my stomach. Like when I’ve forgotten something important. Only I haven’t forgotten anything – it isn’t that. It’s . . . It’s Patrick. I’m not sure he listened properly. Not sure he heard right. Like when I told him about Yan leaning over the body, giving him mouth-to-mouth. Did I see close up? he asked. I shook my head. You’re sure he was giving mouth-to-mouth? I shook my head again. So he could have been rifling through his pockets, could he?

  I put down my toothbrush. Who knows. Maybe he was. Like Patrick said, I wasn’t that close. Maybe I got it wrong. I told Patrick the facts, and that’s what matters. Like he said, it isn’t my job to interpret.

  But I’ve still got a bad taste in my mouth.

  Then I remember why. It isn’t Patrick. It isn’t Yan, or Mr Best even. It’s the young woman. Last night, in my garden. The freak. I know she was there, know I didn’t imagine it. I start to sweat. They’re getting closer. Either the freaks are getting closer, or I’m getting madder.

  ‘Don’t want to be late for school, son,’ a disembodied voice calls up the stairs.

  Don’t I? How does he know?

  ‘Yeah. Coming.’

  I decide against breakfast – instead I clean my teeth again. I look at myself in the mirror. I’ve got bags under my eyes, dark shadows that make me look a bit like a junkie. Not that I’ve ever come across a real junkie – just the ones you see on telly. Pathetic, isn’t it? Most of my life experience gleaned from programmes made by geeks who work for the BBC.

  School is a twenty-minute walk away. It’s a good school – well thought of, does OK in the league tables. We had an inspection a year ago and it was like one of those makeover shows – everywhere was painted, Sellotaped together, made to look as shiny as possible. We had to wear our uniform properly, neatly, with NO ABERRATIONS for the whole time they were there; we had to be polite, hold doors open, make out we were responsible, mature individuals who were having a great ‘learning experience’. I enjoyed it, actually – took the opportunity to do a bit of role play. I pretended I was someone called Alfred who loves geometry. One of the inspectors interviewed me and I think he was pretty impressed. I said my onl
y criticism of the school was that people didn’t take trigonometry seriously enough. He didn’t say anything to that; he just nodded and looked at me strangely for a few seconds.

  Maybe I should be an actor when I’m older. Are actors all people just trying to escape from who they are?

  I walk through the gates. I’m in a sea of navy blue, white and grey. Grey trousers/skirts, white shirts, blue jumpers, blue cardigans, grey jackets. Grey socks, great clunky shoes. It’s familiar, reassuring. I can disappear into it, get swept away by the grey, navy and white current.

  A familiar smell hits me as soon as I get to the door, as soon as I’m in the corridor. School smell. Cleaning fluids, smelly feet, hormones, desperation, boredom, dirty hair, urine. They did their best to get rid of it for the inspectors – masked it with paint, mainly. But it was back before the week was up. It’s soaked into the fabric of the building.

  I wander into the boys’ toilets. There are several urinals, a few cubicles. You go in one of them at your peril; some idiot’s only going to bang on the door while someone else climbs up to see what you’re doing, to put you off your stride. It’s a jungle, school. You can’t let your guard down ever.

  I’m done now; I’m at the basin, washing my hands. Don’t know why I bother really – the moment I touch anything they’re going to be covered in germs again, but you go through the rituals, don’t you? Gives life order, or something like that. If you stop believing that washing your hands will make them clean, then you may as well give up on everything.

  I’m looking in the mirror again. I’m not vain, don’t get me wrong. More interested. My face has changed. Is changing. Gradually, but I only noticed a few weeks ago so it’s come as a bit of a shock. My cheeks are hollowing. I don’t look so much like a kid any more. I look older. I look weary. Fifteen-year-olds aren’t meant to look weary, are they?

  I squint at my reflection; I don’t know if I like what I see. What do other people see? I try to look at myself objectively. Dark hair. Longish. Straggly. Dad wants me to cut it but I keep avoiding the barbers. I like it long. Curly too. Not corkscrew curls, just a wave. I like to think I’ve got natural surfer hair.

  Actually, that’s something Claire once said. She told me my hair suited me – that I shouldn’t cut it off because it softened my face. She said my hair was a clue to who I really was. I remember asking how she knew who I really was, and she said that she saw me sometimes, the real me, hidden under all these layers. She said I wasn’t that tough underneath. Naturally, I punched her. Not hard, just in protest.

  I scrutinise my appearance. Does my face need softening? I narrow my eyes in concentration. I’ve got blue eyes. Cold blue. Cold blue’s intimidating. It can be useful having intimidating eyes, though. I’ve got quite a square jaw too. That’s good, right?

  I turn my face to consider my profile. I notice someone looking up at my reflection and I swing round, startled, embarrassed.

  It’s Yan’s brother. He’s slumped against the wall. He looks like he’s got a broken nose. There’s blood all over his face.

  I don’t know how long he’s been there. Didn’t hear him come in. Has he been watching me all this time? ‘Here. Clean yourself up.’ I throw him a paper towel and he dabs uselessly at his nose. ‘What happened?’

  He shakes his head. ‘Nothing. Nothing happened.’

  Yan’s brother is in Year Eight. He’s got none of Yan’s easy confidence, none of his footballing skills. He’s a bit overweight, which doesn’t help, and he gets nervous when he’s talking in front of lots of people, even people he knows.

  He hangs out with the oddballs in his year. The geek squad, they call them. That could explain the bleeding nose – someone probably punched him. There’s a few in every year. The misfits – the ones who are too clever, or too stupid, or just plain weird. He falls into the last category. I guess it’s because he’s foreign.

  ‘Doesn’t look like nothing.’ I pass him another wet towel. With his face cleaned up a bit you can see his nose isn’t broken, just covered in blood and snot. His eyes look up at me, nervous, afraid.

  ‘You need to watch yourself,’ I say. ‘Your brother’s in enough trouble as it is.’

  He nods silently.

  ‘You’re sure you don’t want to say who did this to you?’ I ask. I can’t help the guy if he won’t tell me who punched the living daylights out of him.

  He shakes his head again.

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  The door bangs behind him. I move to leave the bathroom but images of Yan, of Mr Best, of the freak woman, come into my mind and I feel light-headed suddenly. I hold on to the basin, steadying myself. My head hurts. I breathe in and out slowly. I tell myself to stop thinking about Yan. Like Dad said last night when I asked him about my statement, I need to leave the police work to the police and legal stuff to the lawyers. They’re trained. They know what they’re doing. I’ve done my bit.

  I realise I didn’t get any lunch money off Dad. I’m starving – my lack of breakfast is starting to look like a pretty stupid idea. I’m feeling nauseous again. Maybe I’m coming down with something. I put my hand in my pocket hopefully – maybe I left a quid in there last week. Unlikely but you never know. My hand alights upon a piece of paper. A receipt? Some useless note? I pull it out and my eyes light up. A fiver. I’ve just found a fiver in my pocket.

  I’m smiling now. Doesn’t take much for life to feel much better, does it? Now I can grab something from the canteen before school starts. Seek and ye shall find. Just when you think life is going down the pan, you get enough of a break to think that maybe things aren’t so bad, just for a little while.

  It’s nearly lunchtime. I’ve got through double Science; now I’m in History. Half an hour until lunch. Thirty minutes. 1800 seconds. Tick, tock.

  It’s funny, time. I mean you’d think, really, that it’s just constant, that it doesn’t change. But it does. It speeds up, slows down; sometimes it disappears completely. If you could control it, if you could make time do what you wanted it to do, that would be amazing. Forget Superman or Spiderman – they’re pointless, stupid. But Time Man? That would be something. Just to be able to stop sometimes, stop everything. Fast-forward over the rubbish bits, let the good times last for ever.

  Me, I’d reverse time. I’d go back a few years. And then I’d press Stop.

  ‘Hodge, perhaps you’d like to tell us what the turning point of the Second World War was?’

  Caught, rabbit in the headlights. The teacher saw me looking at the clock. Such a rookie mistake. I grimace.

  ‘It was that battle, wasn’t it, Miss?’

  She’s too clever for that. ‘That battle? Could you be more specific?’

  I look down at my book. It isn’t even open at the right page – it’s a chapter about the Russian Revolution.

  ‘D-Day?’ I ask, dredging the memory from somewhere. A television programme. I can see black and white images of men jumping off boats. I saw an old film once about a man who knew about the secret landing. He woke up in a hospital after his plane went down and there were all these nurses and nice people looking after him. They said he’d been in a coma. Said the war was long over. Said Britain had won. They were trying to get him to reminisce, to tell them the story about how they wanted the Germans to think they were landing in one place when actually they were landing somewhere else. And then he realised that he had a paper cut on his finger. A paper cut that he’d had the morning his plane went down. D-Day hadn’t happened yet. He’d been captured by the Germans and they were trying to find out the real landing destination. For an old film, it was actually pretty good.

  ‘D-Day was how we won the war,’ she’s saying. ‘But there were several turning points during the war. Have you heard of Pearl Harbor?’

  I frown. ‘Maybe.’ I get a weird sensation in my stomach. A kind of tingling in my head. I concen
trate on my breathing.

  ‘Maybe.’ The teacher rolls her eyes. ‘Has anyone else heard of Pearl Harbor? Would someone like to explain what happened and why it changed the course of the war?’

  There was a film called Pearl Harbor too, wasn’t there? I didn’t see it. I’m pretty sure of it. I didn’t watch it – the football was on at the same time and Dad never likes to miss a match. I think the film was a love story – I didn’t know it was about the Second World War.

  No one volunteers the answer so the teacher gives up and tells us. It was the Japanese, bombing American bases, making the Americans want to join the war. I’m getting a headache. I think I’m hungry. A Snickers bar probably wasn’t the best breakfast.

  ‘And the other turning point was the Battle of Britain,’ she’s saying. ‘Who can tell me something about the Battle of Britain?’

  Claire puts up her hand. ‘It was the bombing, wasn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right. A sustained effort by the Luftwaffe to gain superiority over the Royal Air Force. Had the effort been successful, well, the war could have taken a very different turn. As it was, the lack of success was considered a major turning point. Although the destruction wreaked on both sides was devastating.’

  ‘It nearly worked,’ I say. I sound angry. I feel angry. It’s my head: it hurts. It’s making me bad-tempered.

  The teacher is staring at me. ‘Yes, Hodge. It did. It very nearly worked.’

  I nod curtly. She’s looking at me strangely; she’s not used to me contributing. Nor am I. I don’t even know why I said that. I look back at my book. My head is giving me some serious pain. Dehydration maybe. I put my hand to my forehead; I think I can feel it throbbing. I grit my teeth.

  ‘But luckily it didn’t,’ she continues. ‘Luckily we defeated them.’

  My head is killing me. I am suddenly full of rage. The teacher is stupid. Ignorant. I dislike her. I despise her.