Spies (2002) (19 page)

Gradually my alarm passes. Keith isn’t going to come. All that part of my life’s over, and there’s no going back. I spread the cloth on the trunk again, replace the jar of privet, and begin my watch on the house. Something has changed there, too, I realise. Beside the front door, in the perfect order of the garden, is a piece of clutter, a foreign object that’s never been there before: a pushchair.

At once I’m alarmed. In all the time I’ve been going to Keith’s house I’ve never seen Auntie Dee or Milly there. I try to imagine Auntie Dee laughing her cheerful laugh among those reverent chimes and silences … or Milly hiding her sticky face in that discreet velvet upholstery …

Once again I hear the voice from the darkness beneath the earth, whispering my name. I close my mind to the memory. I don’t have to think about these things, because soon they’ll be gone for ever. All I have to do is wait, with my mind closed.

The front door opens, and Auntie Dee comes out carrying Milly. Milly’s crying. Keith’s mother appears in the doorway and stands watching, saying nothing, as Auntie Dee straps Milly into the pushchair. She goes on standing silently in the doorway as Auntie Dee hurries the pushchair towards the gate, then runs after her and says something to her. Auntie Dee stops and listens, her head bowed. Milly howls louder than ever. Keith’s mother runs back to the front door. Auntie Dee runs after her. They stand talking on the step, while Milly howls by the gate. Dee presses her hands to her face, then to her ears.

Mrs Avery comes slowly up the street, carrying a heavy bag of potatoes. She crosses over to the Haywards and bends down to comfort Milly. Auntie Dee comes down the garden path, smiling at Mrs Avery. Keith’s mother smiles from the doorstep.

Mrs Avery goes back across the street and continues towards her own house. Auntie Dee’s smile vanishes. She picks up the weeping Milly, and half runs back down the street to her own house, her head down, scrambling the pushchair along in front of her.

Keith’s mother comes irresolutely a few steps down the garden path, then realises she’s being watched by Keith’s father from the front door, and sets off to follow Auntie Dee down the street. Keith’s father comes down to the front gate and examines the standard roses, whistling.

By the time Keith’s mother reaches Auntie Dee’s front door it’s already shut. She knocks and waits. She knocks again. And waits. Keith’s father goes back into the house, still whistling.

Keith’s mother walks back up the road. Mrs McAfee is coming in the opposite direction. She smiles at Keith’s mother. ‘Your Ena Harkness is a real credit to the street!’ she says. Keith’s mother smiles back at her. ‘Ted does work awfully hard at the garden,’ she says. She walks up the garden path, as calm and unhurried as ever. And as formally dressed, with another silk cravat, crimson this time instead of blue, high around her throat.

The front door closes. I feel the other piece of silk in my pocket, but it seems to me that I’m never going to be able to deliver my message now. Everything has changed once again, and changed for ever.

I’m wrong about Keith. When I crawl back into the lookout after supper, there he is, waiting for me.

He’s sitting cross-legged in the middle of the newly swept floor, lost in his own thoughts. It must be at least two weeks since he was last in here, but he glances up at me as passingly as if it were a couple of hours. He offers no explanation either of why he’s been making himself so scarce or why he’s now reappeared. His face is set and brooding, intent upon the object he’s fingering.

It’s the bayonet.

The trunk’s standing open. On the ground beside it are the duster that had been spread over the lid, the jam jar of privet blossom, and the tile marked private.

Of course. I really knew all the time that he’d come back sooner or later. I feel the shame in my face, and then another and even more unpleasant sensation in my hands and throat and in the depths of my stomach. Fear.

I realise at once that there’s one way, and only one way, in which I can avoid the punishment that’s coming. I can show him the scarf. It’s in the pocket of my shorts. This is why I’ve come back, to lock it away in the trunk.

I’ll spread it out on the ground in front of him, and tell him that I’ve solved the problem he set us. I’ve unravelled the mystery that we began investigating together. I’ll tell him quite simply: ‘It’s a secret message for your mother. From the old tramp in the Barns. He’s a German. He’s ill. Your mother has taken him to her bosom.’

I don’t, though. I don’t show him the scarf, because it can’t be shown. I don’t say the words, because they can’t be said.

He raises his eyes from the bayonet and looks at me for the first time. His eyes are cold. ‘You showed her our things,’ he says softly.

‘I didn’t!’ I cry. Too late I realise that he hasn’t even named her, and that I shouldn’t have let myself know who he meant.

He glances at the tile and the decorations he’s removed from the top of the trunk.

‘Yes, but I didn’t show her anything inside it!’ I cry. Because I
didn’t
! She just looked! And in any case there’s no way he can tell that the trunk has ever been opened.

He smiles his father’s thin smile.

‘I
didn’t
!’ I cry, almost weeping with sincerity. ‘Honestly and truly!’

He begins to nod his head slightly, slowly and deliberately, as if he’s counting off the seconds while he waits for my confession. ‘You swore, old bean,’ he says.

‘I know, and I
didn’t
!’

He suddenly raises the bayonet, and holds it in front of my face. He looks straight into my eyes, no longer smiling or nodding. ‘Swear again,’ he says.

I place my hand on the flat of the blade as I did before. And as I did before, I feel in my skin the electric sharpness that surrounds it. ‘I swear,’ I say.

‘That I didn’t break the solemn oath I swore never to reveal our secret things.’

I drop my eyes as I repeat the words. But I
didn’t
break the oath! I
didn’t
reveal our things!

‘So help me God,’ I repeat after him, still not looking at him. ‘Or cut my throat and hope to die.’

I manage to raise my eyes at last, and find that he’s taking something out of the trunk and holding it up for me to see. It’s the flattened Players cigarette packet. His eyes are still fixed on me. My face is burning with the heat of my shame.

‘It wasn’t … I didn’t …’ I stammer. ‘She must have found the key.’

Suddenly his face is just in front of mine, though, smiling again, and I can feel the point of the bayonet against my throat. ‘You swore,’ he whispers. ‘You double-swore.’

I can’t speak. Something, either terror or the pressure of the blade on my windpipe, seems to be constricting my voice. I try to move my head back a little. The bayonet follows the movement, and presses harder.

‘You said, “So help me God,”’ he whispers. ‘You said “Cut my throat and hope to die.”’

I can’t speak. I can’t move. All I can do is to remain frozen with fear as the pressure of the blade against my windpipe gradually increases. He’s not actually going to cut my throat, I understand that. He’s going to go on until he breaks the skin, though, and lets the germs on the blade into my bloodstream. I can’t take my eyes off that smile six inches in front of my face. It comes slowly closer and closer, as Barbara Berrill’s face did when she kissed me. His eyes look into mine. They’re the eyes of a stranger.

The blade presses slowly harder. And now suddenly I’m not sure after all that it
is
ever going to stop.

‘And then you showed her,’ he whispers. I know my eyes are filling with tears of pain and humiliation, and I can feel another little source of wetness around the point of the bayonet, as the blood wells out and mingles with the germs. And now I’m beginning to think it’s true, that I did show her our secret things, though I suddenly wonder if it’s really Barbara Berrill he means or if it isn’t perhaps his mother. I have the odd idea that in some strange way we’re talking about both of them – that the crime he’s punishing in me is not mine at all, but one that’s being committed inside his own house. And even in the extremity of my terror I suddenly realise where he learnt to practise this particular form of torture with this particular instrument, and why his mother, in the heat of summer, has taken to wearing that cravat pinned high around her neck.

Slowly, slowly the pressure on my throat increases. All I have to do is take out the scarf and give it him, as I gave his father the basket …

I can’t do it, though. I can’t let Keith’s eye fall upon those rawly private words, sent on silk by that living ghost in the Barns to Keith’s own mother.
Chemnitz … Leipzig … Zwickau
… They can’t be revealed! For Keith’s own sake as much as for hers. I can’t show him what spying actually means – the fear, the tears, the silken, whispered words.

Chemnitz … Leipzig … Zwickau
… If those names were ever spoken, another name might jump out after them, a name that would shame Keith for ever, a name that I’ve never allowed myself to think.

Now he’s no longer smiling. His look’s intent. The tip of his tongue’s in the corner of his mouth, as it is when he’s concentrating on some fine detail of a model he’s building. The wetness on my throat begins to run down inside the front of my shirt. I become aware of a whimpering sound that must be coming from me.

And there we crouch, locked together by the logic of torture. We shall be here for ever. My hand would move and give him the scarf if it could. But it can’t. I gave in to his father. I’m not going to give in again.

And then it’s over. The pressure on my throat begins to ease, and ceases altogether. I hadn’t realised that my eyes had closed until I open them to see what’s going on. Keith has sat back on his haunches again, and he’s looking at the blood on the bayonet. He cleans it carefully in the earth.

‘Do what you like, then, old bean,’ he says coldly. ‘Play houses with your girlfriend if you want to. I don’t care.’

He looks at me with contempt.

‘What are you blubbing about?’ he says. ‘That didn’t hurt. If you think that hurt, you don’t know what hurting is.’

I’m not crying, in fact. I have tears in my eyes and my breath is still coming in little convulsive gasps, but I’m not actually crying.

He shrugs. ‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘it’s all your own fault, old chum.’ He rummages in the trunk and takes out a scrap of emery paper he keeps to shine the bayonet. He’s evidently lost interest in me. My breathing gradually returns to normal. I’m still alive, and the harsh sweetness of the privet is back in my nostrils.

Neither of us says anything more. There’s nothing more to say.

And the scarf is still in my pocket. He lost his nerve a fraction of a second before I lost mine. The world has changed yet again. And again, I think for ever.

I try to slip into the house without drawing attention to myself. I’ve done up the top button of my shirt, but it won’t go as high as Keith’s mother’s cravat, and in any case I’m aware that the blood has splashed over the collar and started to make a dark patch below it. My plan is to get upstairs into the bathroom and put a plaster on my throat to stop the bleeding, then somehow to wash the shirt in the basin.

I’m already on the stairs when my mother emerges from the kitchen.

‘Where on earth have you been?’ she demands. ‘What do you think you’re playing at? Your satchel’s still sitting exactly where you dumped it when you came in from school. You’ve got exams tomorrow! You’ve got revision to do!’

Before I can attempt to answer any of these questions, though, she’s noticed the state of my shirt.

‘What’s
this
?’ she says, even more crossly. ‘Some kind of red stuff! It’s not
paint
? Oh, Stephen, for heaven’s
sake
! How do you expect me to get
paint
off? That’s your school shirt!’

Suddenly she bends closer.

‘Your neck …’ she says. ‘Your throat …’

She grabs me by the arm and marches me into the dining room, where my father’s sitting at the table with his files and papers in front of him and his glasses on the end of his nose.

‘Look!’ she cries. ‘Look what’s happened now! I
knew
there was something wrong! You’ve got to put a stop to it!’

My father gently undoes my collar and examines my throat.

‘Who did this to you, Stephen?’

I say nothing.

‘It wasn’t
Keith
?’ demands my mother.

I shake my head.

‘One of the other boys?’

I shake my head again.

My father leads me gently upstairs to the bathroom. ‘I don’t like bullying,’ he says. ‘I’ve seen too much of it in my lifetime.’

He fills the basin, then washes the wound with a tenderness that I can’t remember in him before. My mother peels the bloody shirt off me. I rescue the scarf even as it falls to the floor, and crumple it tight in my hand.

Geoff emerges from our bedroom to find out what’s going on, and stands watching from the bathroom doorway as the red threads curl away into the water like upside-down cigarette smoke.

‘What happened, kid?’ he asks. Calling people ‘kid’ is his latest affectation. ‘Trying to cut your throat?’

‘If it was Keith,’ says my mother to my father, ‘you’ll have to say something to his parents.’

‘This wasn’t play,’ says my father, gently swabbing. ‘It almost went into his windpipe. It could have severed the artery.’

‘You
must
tell us who it was, darling,’ says my mother. ‘It’s not telling tales.’

I say nothing.

‘He can’t speak,’ says Geoff. ‘They’ve cut his vocal cords.’

‘Keep out of this, will you, Geoff?’ says my father. ‘Just go and get the first-aid box from the cupboard under the stairs.’

He holds a piece of dry cotton wool to the wound, waiting for it to staunch. ‘Just tell us what happened, Stephen.’

Silence.

‘Was it one of the children? What did they say? Were they calling you names again? What names did they call you?’