The Gift (9 page)

Mum looked at her reflection in a teaspoon, frowned, and put it down.

“Well, I was shopping and I went past Chepstow's—you know, the ironmonger—and I just stopped to look in the window …”

“What do
you
want in an ironmonger's?” fuffled Davy through his toast.

“Idiot,” said Penny. “The window has a good reflection, of course.”

“Yes, it has,” said Mum eagerly. “And that's how I saw this bloke.”

“Tall and dashing, with a broken nose?” said Penny.

“He
did
have a broken nose,” said Mum in a surprised voice. “But he was ever so little and his face was all wrinkled—I mean at first I thought it was a kid with one of those masks on, but then I saw it was just a bloke. He was standing a bit off, but I knew he was watching me.”

“How?” said Davy.

“You get to know.
I
don't mind. Let 'em have a good look, if that's what they want. So I didn't think about it. But then, down in Market Row I spotted him again. I'd just come out of the butcher's, and there he was on the other side of the street, him looking in a shop window this time, but he was still looking at me. And when I went up to Corinne's to see about my appointment, there he was again. And twice more after that, different places. But he was always keeping a bit off and pretending he wasn't there.”

“Shy, I expect,” said Penny. “If you don't like it, you'll have to give up Corinne's and go to an ugly parlor, where they'll make you into an old hag, and then no one will bother you.”

“No, it wasn't
like
that,” insisted Mum. “I'll tell you what it was like. Do you remember that time in Bristol when your Dad got in a mess over those bananas and the police thought perhaps he'd been hijacking or something, and anyway they followed me around for a week, to see what I was doing. I spotted them at once, of course, just like with this bloke. But there's no reason now …”

“Don't
champ
. Davy!” shouted Penny. “It's bad enough for Mum and me sitting here watching you wolf all those calories. You don't have to make that disgusting noise as well.”

“You wouldn't have to worry if you'd take a bit of exercise,” said Davy. “Football or something.”

He meant it as a joke, but Penny threw herself into one of her rare fits of sulks. Mum, too, became irritable at hearing her little drama suddenly forgotten. And Dad was later than he should have been, and when he did get in, he was exuding bounce and go. The evening soured. Mum declared a headache (like declaring war) and went early to bed. Penny lay brooding on the floor of her bedroom playing over and over again a Stones LP which she knew everyone else in the house hated. Davy toiled through the rest of his homework, went out for a brief bike ride in the windy dark, and at last settled down with Dad in the living room to watch a League Cup quarterfinal on TV. It was a match to echo his mood, dull, rough, muddy, and unskillful. He was almost asleep when he started picking up pictures from Dad.

Usually he would have shut them out at once, by working out the area of the TV screen in square centimeters and converting that to square inches, or something of the sort. But this particular evening had set its own mood on everything everybody did, a sort of distrust and dislike of each other, a self-concern and selfpity which made prying into Dad's mind seem, for the moment, a perfectly fair thing to do.

Anyway Dad's pictures never meant much, because they were daydreams—Dad bringing off an impossible shot to win the Open Golf, with the tiny white ball soaring over a mighty tree to land within a foot of the pin at the eighteenth; Dad slamming forehand drives but of reach of a rattled Rod Laver; Dad scoring a couple of hundred runs against the clock in the final match game. Tonight, for instance, he was piloting a gleaming yacht across a sunlit bay; Penny was sunbathing on the deck by the cockpit, and another figure—Ian, but without his beard—was marlin fishing in the bows; a black steward in a white jacket appeared carrying a silver tray with a champagne bottle on it … and because it was that sort of evening, Davy's main feeling was not amusement but jealousy that he'd been left out of Dad's ridiculous dream of wealth.

And then the picture fogged and changed. This was something real, something whose solidity and dullness showed that it wasn't a daydream but had really happened. A man in a pale blue suit with a matching shirt and tie was sitting at a table in a pub. Davy knew him at once. He was Wolf's God, Mr. Black Hat. He pulled a leather wallet out and passed a five-pound note to another man, who rose from the table and picked up some of the glasses. This second man was small, with a wrinkled face, but Davy couldn't see him well because Dad was concentrating on Mr. Black Hat's wallet. It was very fat, and all the fatness was money.

One of the treacheries of the gift was that the moment you became interested in something it showed you the picture was snatched away. Now Davy's shock and worry broke in, and there was Dad lolling on the sofa, staring at the sweating footballers.

“That ref's blind,” he said. “Did you ever see a foul like that?”

“I've been asleep,” said Davy. “What's the score?”

“Nil nil. What a game!”

“I'm going to bed.”

“So'm I, in a minute. Sleep well, old chap.”

Davy paused outside Penny's door and listened. Mick Jagger was still telling the world, in a furious gargle, what it could do with itself. So there was no point in trying to talk to her. It was going to be difficult, whenever he chose.

He chose Sunday morning. There was a ritual about weekends. Dad washed and polished the car on Saturday afternoon (which he seemed to enjoy, though he'd never bothered with any of his other old bangers). On Sunday he put on a sporty blazer and took Mum to a pub, for the midday shouting match. Penny never got up till eleven, but then she washed her hair and got the dinner ready. It was always the same. Davy could be sure of finding her in the kitchen, with her hair rolled in a pink towel like a turban, peeling potatoes to roast with the ritual chicken.

“Can I help?” he said.

“You can lay the table, if you want to.”

“I'll peel the spuds if you like, while you get your hair dry.”

“What's come over you?”

“Well, I want to talk to you, and …”

“If it's about your gift, no thanks.”

“It's important, Pen. It really is.”

Penny levered an eye out of the white potato flesh with obsessive care.

“Is it about me?” she said.

“It's not about anything I've seen you thinking, if that's what you mean.”

“Dad?”

“Yes.”

“Hell! Oh, well, at least it might give me a clue what's got into him. Hang on while I get the blower.”

Davy took the peeler and set to work, sorting his thoughts out while Penny balanced the fan heater on the kitchen stool so that it was at a convenient height for her to sit with her dank locks in its warm blast. Then he told her what he knew, starting with the first awareness of Wolf at the trailer park, and going on to the night he felt him watching the house.

“I remember that,” said Penny, shaking the first dry tresses out to float in the stream of air. “I knew you were dead scared about something. Go on.”

By the time he'd finished all her hair was alive, electric with brushing, and her face was red with the heat from the fan. She went on brushing in silence.

“It means something,” he said. “It all fits in, but I can't see how.”

“Uh-huh. Don't be angry with me, Dave, but have you thought about it this way? Perhaps it's all coming from inside
you
. Okay, I know you can do it—pick up people's thoughts—no, wait a sec—listen—I'm not getting at you, but can you tell the difference between someone else's pictures and pictures that you think of yourself and then persuade yourself they're coming from outside you? How do you
know
? You can't, can you? And this Wolf bloke—what you think are his thoughts are different anyway, so perhaps they really aren't his at all—no, listen—you're sitting in the bus and you see this picture and, of course, you think it's coming from outside you, so you attach it to the blokes in the car. Next time you attach it to a bloke who was doing something in that carport, and he's got a funny walk, and then you see him down at the site without knowing you've seen him and that sets it off again. Look, I'm not saying it
must
have. Only it
might
have.”

Davy turned from the sink, cold all through. Penny could be right, and that would mean that he, Davy … He forced himself to think properly.

“No,” he said, sighing with relief. “It didn't happen that way. That night I worked out where he was, by the pictures, before I could see him. And he was there. And when I followed him, I saw the car in the pictures before I saw it really, and it was the same car I'd seen from the bus. I can't prove it, Pen. I mean I can't prove it to
you
, I can only prove it to me.”

“Fair enough. Dad's been jumpy as hell since half term, specially those nights when he's late home. Finished? Okay, let's go.”

She switched the blower off with a furious gesture, snatched a saucepan up, and shoved it down on the gas.

“They won't be back for a couple of hours, nearly,” said Davy.

“They can eat alone. I'm not waiting. What are you going to do? Tackle Dad?”

“I can't. I promised Granny …”

“Okay, okay, but you might have to, someday. Look, I don't think you've got enough yet anyway. Dad's up to something, and it's connected with these two blokes, and one of them watched our house once and now he works on your site. And he's some kind of violent nut, too. And the other bloke's got a lot of money in his wallet. That's all we know.”

“Dad couldn't stop thinking about that money.”

“Yes, but that doesn't mean anything. You know Dad—he'd only have to see
anybody
flashing a lot of cash about to start daydreaming. It's nothing to do with us. It's his lookout.”

“If he gets involved with something that loses him his job, we'll be out of this house—out of Spenser Mills, probably. That's something to do with us.”

“I suppose so. Only … only I don't see why
I
should get involved. Anyway you haven't got enough to go on yet. You'll just have to wait, and use that gift of yours. Be a spy.”

“It's not like that,” said Davy angrily. “It doesn't tell you anything you want to know—only just enough to make you worry or feel afraid.”

“I bet real spies are like that,” said Penny. “They don't find out much, and even that little bit might mean all sorts of things, and in the end the generals just guess.”

“We can't just guess.”

“I didn't say we could, stupid. But there's no harm in your sitting around with Dad a bit more, and trying to pick up pictures. Otherwise we'll just have to wait for something in the real world to happen.”

Penny opened the freezer door and took out a packet of hamburgers which she savaged from their wrapping with a bread knife. She slapped three down on the table, then paused with the fourth in midair.

“That picture,” she said. “The one they hung outside Assembly and there was that fuss about. Is that how your bloke thinks?”

“Some of the time,” said Davy.

“Nasty,” she said.

6

MONKEY

The spy discovered nothing.

Davy took to doing his homework in the living room, against the blah from the telly, instead of in his own room. All that happened was that he got worse marks and began to feel how tense and fragile a film was Dad's mask of confidence. Dad couldn't nowadays watch even his favorite programs without switching channels every ten minutes, and when Mum insisted on seeing something right through, he'd be out of his chair half the time, fiddling with the volume or the contrast or brightness controls. Davy lay behind the sofa with his books spread around him, trying to relax his mind and let the pictures come, but he saw nothing.

Only one night, in bed, in the dark, he heard Dad coming up the stairs, wheezing slightly with the climb. Or was he sighing? Anyway he was thinking about Granny. She sat in the sun by the larder door, shelling peas. She was young, and though she wasn't specially pretty, Davy could understand now, for the first time, why that other Davy and his friend Huw had done what they had done. There was a shadow on the dark red tiles of the yard, the shadow of a boy watching his mother shell peas.

Davy didn't tell Penny about this. It was Dad's own private thing. He felt ashamed at having seen it himself.

Nothing else happened all that week and most of the next. November dragged away in cloud and drizzle until on the next local geog morning Davy picked his way to the building site along an unpaved path that sent reddish mud squelching up the sides of his shoes. It reminded him of Dad walking through the hoof-poached gateway of the farmyard. By the time he rounded the temporary bank the drizzle had thickened to real rain, and even when he reached the dark sheltered passage beneath the site office, he had to dodge small waterfalls that had somehow made their way through.

Then Mr. Venn's office was so warm and stuffy that you had to wipe the steam off the windows every time you wanted to look out at the site, where the workmen trudged through the cloying clay in yellow waterproofs. The job, like all building jobs, was behind schedule, but Mr. Venn said that if the weather worsened, he'd have to call the men in.

Mr. Palozzi had ordered the digger crews (over whom he had no authority at all) to bring him anything interesting that the grabs came up with. So Davy was sketching a fossil sea urchin when he heard a knock at the door and automatically looked around. All the time now, when he was on the site, he was afraid that he would come face-to-face with Wolf, that their eyes would meet, and that in that instant Wolf would know him as well as he knew Wolf.