The Messengers (19 page)

I went back to the hut the next day and found him.

He was piling his stuff into a kit bag. He was not a good packer. All the paints and brushes — he just dumped them in. I watched him for a bit, puzzled. The sun was hanging unsteadily above the Big Dipper on Helmstown Pier.

“Hi,” I said. “I figured it must have gone well yesterday, seeing as you didn’t make it back for our meeting.”

He froze, crouched, with his fingers around the straps of his bag. His green eyes flashed, and I couldn’t decide if he looked more like a hunter or some poor creature scared out of its wits.

“What’s the matter with you?” I said.

His limbs broke out of the freeze, and he stood up tall, looking both ways down the path. “Nothing,” he said.

“So,” I said, “how did it go? With Rowenna?”

“Great,” he said. “They’re going to let me take Joe out for the day. To the zoo.”

“That’s brilliant,” I said. “Hey, it’s been four days without any messages now. Do you think we’ve beaten it?”

“No,” he said. “It’s not as predictable as that.” He couldn’t even look at me. I knew there was something wrong, and although the day was warm, I shivered.

“Shall we go and get a cup of tea, then?” I said.

“I can’t,” he said.

“Why not?” I said. “Where are you going? You’re acting weird. Even for
you
.”

“I can’t see you anymore, Frances,” he said.

I felt the cold hard shock of his words.

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“Your uncle. Robert, is it?”

“What about him?” I said.

“He’s had a word with the police.”

I had almost forgotten about the two officers outside Peter’s hut the day before.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Apparently he’s got friends in high places,” Peter said. “The officers said they thought it was unwise for me to invite teenage girls into the hut. They made it sound like I was . . .
trying it on with you
. Which is crazy.”

“Of course it is,” I said.

I didn’t think it was crazy. I’d have done anything to get him to try it on with me. Anything except ask.

“They seemed to know everything — well, not everything, but a lot. They said you were going through a tough time, with your brother’s situation, and that your family thinks you’re at risk.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said.

“They said that if I continued to hang around with you, they’d make sure I never saw my son again,” he said. His voice was low and blank.

“What did you say?”

“I told them I’d leave you alone,” he said.

“Right,” I said. “But . . .”

What did I want to say? I wanted to say,
But surely you’re not that weak. But surely you told them to stick it
.

“I mean, you do understand, don’t you?” he said.

I nodded.

“Your uncle is a meddler,” he said, and bent slowly to put some blank postcards into his bag. He looked nervously up and down the path again. I realized that he was hoping nobody would see us together.

“So that’s it, is it?” I said.

“Well, not forever, obviously. Just until this thing with the police blows over. It’s just — Joseph is my son, you know. I’d do anything for him.”

“What about the recipients? What about the people we have to save? Am I supposed to work out my messages on my own?”

“You’re good enough now. You can do it. And remember, Frances, you can’t save everyone.”

I shook my head. The question I really wanted to ask was this:
What about you and me?
But I didn’t.

“Frances?” he said. “Tell me you understand. It’s very important to me that you understand.
You’re
important to me, as a friend. But I just can’t have any contact with you for a while.”

“I understand,” I said flatly.

He hoisted his bag onto his shoulder and piled a few nonessentials into a box that he left on the grass behind the hut. Then he came back round and padlocked the front door. “I’ll call you,” he said.

I walked toward him, and I can honestly say that I was planning to kiss him. A kiss from a girl changes everything. It makes men stay when they say they’re leaving. I’d seen it happen in films. And anyway, I desperately wanted to do it. I stared at his lips as I got closer. I stopped. We were so near to each other that I could feel his breath on me.

I kicked him in the shin as hard as I possibly could, and I ran.

I ran toward the sun without looking back. I knew the kick hadn’t hurt him. He hadn’t even flinched. He was strong. Physically.

I tried to drain myself with running. I tried to pour all of the energy and disappointment and fear out through my feet. I ran along the sea path, and then I went down the steps to the beach so I could hear the churning of the sea. The stones made me go slow. The last thing I remember about that morning was seeing the big rusty girders that held up the pier. Then I blacked out.

I must have lain on the beach for a long time. Eventually I staggered up onto street level, made my way onto the pier, and collapsed on a bench. The sea rolled in gently, and the rides and games pinged and whirled. I was numb, exhausted, but I tried to keep focused. I held the postcard in my hand, facedown, and had a good, stern word with myself.
Come on, Frances. You’ve got to look at it. There’s no time for self-pity
.

It looked like a photograph. I couldn’t believe I’d managed to draw something of such detail. It wasn’t like any death scene I’d ever drawn, and it wasn’t like any death scene Peter had ever painted.

It featured a man suspended in midfall above a pavement, his legs off the ground, his chin to his chest, an expression of pain on his face. He looked like he’d fallen into the drawing. Tiny grains of smashed glass surrounded him, like he’d just shaken water off his body. There was a lot of fine detail: the stubble on the man’s face, the fields in the background, the shadow on the pavement. But there were hardly any clues. Hardly anything to look at but the man, the glass, and the fields. He was in his early twenties. His hair was closely cropped; he wore a vest and jeans and big aviator sunglasses. Johnny.

Peter would’ve said it was inevitable, but I didn’t believe in that.

I couldn’t look at it for too long. My vision kept going gray, as if there were a part of my brain trying to turn out the lights because it didn’t want my eyes to see the picture.

Pull yourself together
, I thought. I tried to look for clues. Peter had taught me that there were always clues, even with a heart attack. But you could usually see more of the death scene —
the context
. This was too hard. Perhaps death was evolving again.

There was only one person who could have worked it out, of course, and that was Peter. But I didn’t know where he was, and he wouldn’t speak to me even if I did.

I had twenty-four hours to save my brother. I looked at my watch and could hardly believe the time — 4:30 p.m.

Twenty hours.

When you’re in shock, you can force yourself to shut out the horror of a situation. It helps you to do what’s necessary. That’s where I was at. I had tunnel vision, and I wasn’t thinking about anything but my next step.

By the time I reached the library, it had already closed. The Internet café didn’t have the software I needed to zoom in on the picture, so I decided I’d have to do that when I got home. I took the postcard to the man at the desk.

“I need this photocopied, please,” I said.

He looked at it and sighed. “Is this supposed to be art?”

“Just copy it,” I said, sliding the money across the desk. He shrugged and did as I told him.

Outside, I started to get angry. I started to hate Peter for leaving me in this mess. I began to doubt that he was the person I thought he was. And yet I went back to the hut. The padlock glinted in the early evening light. The remaining box of his stuff was well hidden. I thought about throwing it in the sea, worthless as it was. Would he ever come back there? I didn’t know. I set down my rucksack, took out a piece of paper and a Berol Venus, and I wrote.

I crossed out the last line until I tore through the paper, and then I slid the note, along with the copy of the drawing, halfway under the door and weighted them down with a rock. I imagined what it was like inside the beach hut. A dusty wooden void.

Maybe, I thought, I was to blame for what I’d drawn. Perhaps, deep in my mind, I wanted to find Johnny so much that I’d drawn him
on purpose
. But my inability to read the message just added to the frustration.

As I marched back to Auntie Lizzie’s, I started to develop a plan of action. It was more a plan of desperation, really, but I had to try to kick-start my mind.

I told myself I could do it. I could figure it out. It was really just a question of following procedure. My self-assurance lasted about fifteen minutes, and by the time I got to Auntie Lizzie’s house, I was a mess. The hope was draining out of me. My hands were shaking, and it felt like my throat was closing in. I was losing it. The sketch was in my rucksack, and I still had the pencil in my fist. I held it so tight that it felt like another bone in my hand. The drawing was, I suppose, just a few scratches on a postcard, but it had become the center of the world, and it was dragging everything — including me — toward it like a huge black hole.

I stood in the hallway with my back to the door and listened to the silence of the house. It was broken by footsteps on the stairs. They were quick and heavy, then they slowed, so I didn’t need to look up to know that it was Uncle Robert.

“Hello, Frances,” he said.

I glanced up at him, but I couldn’t respond. The postcard, and what I had to do with it, filled my head so completely that there was barely even room for language. Uncle Robert stood there with his hands together. Auntie Lizzie emerged from the living room. “Hey,” she said, her eyes cast down sympathetically. “Everything OK, love?”

“No,” I said.

“We’re sorry it had to come to this, but we really didn’t know what else to do. You wouldn’t talk to us, and we were worried,” said Auntie Lizzie. She took a couple of steps toward me, but I didn’t move.

“I spoke to my friend Brian, who works with the city police force,” said Uncle Robert. “I asked his advice. That’s all. About your friend —”

“Peter,” I said quietly. What they were saying seemed so completely trivial, given what I had just drawn.

“Right. He’s quite a bit older than you. Brian looked into things. We don’t want to judge, but apparently Peter has had his problems. We didn’t know if you knew. With his mental health and so forth.”

I started to cry. I had kept my feelings under control for so long. I had been strong for my mum at home. I had been strong for Johnny, strong for Peter. But I was alone now, and I just couldn’t do it anymore. I wasn’t crying out of sadness or self-pity, though. It was fear.

“Oh, Fran, baby,” said Auntie Lizzie. “I know it’s hard.” She put her arms around me and I began to shake.

“Johnny,” I said through my tears.

“Johnny?”
Auntie Lizzie said, slightly surprised. “Johnny will be OK, Fran.”

“No,” I gasped. “No.”

“He will. We’ll work something out,” she said. “Robert knows a couple of people in law, and —”

I snapped. “You don’t understand! You don’t fucking know what’s happening! He will
not
be OK! He’s going to die! Johnny is going to die! Oh, Jesus. It’s my fault. I have to . . .”

I turned and opened the door, but Auntie Lizzie kept hold of my arm, and pretty soon Uncle Robert had hold of me, too.

“Let me go!” I screamed. “I have to go! I’ve got to
do
something!”

Uncle Robert was stronger than I would have thought. He had me around the middle, and I couldn’t break free. I knew I’d completely lost control, because Auntie Lizzie and Uncle Robert stopped talking to me and spoke to each other instead.
“Have you got her?” “Yes. Close the door.” “Should we call someone?” “Let’s get her upstairs, give her a chance to calm down.”

“For God’s sake, let me go!” I screamed.

It was all a bit hazy after that.