The Messengers (2 page)

His manner was businesslike, as if it was just inevitable that our conversation would continue.

“Who said anything about later.” I stepped away from the door and looked down the path, but there was nobody about. The sea fizzed as it dragged over the stones. I stared out on the endless darkness. You didn’t get that sort of dark stretch back home.

“I’ve seen you around,” he said.

“I doubt it. I’ve only been here a week.”

“Please yourself.”

“I generally do. What, you think you’re a mystic? Some sort of fortune-teller?”

“I’m not a mystic,” he said.

“Not in that tracksuit top, you’re not. Is that supposed to be retro?”

He laughed. “No. I probably bought it the first time it was fashionable. I just wear it to work in. It helps me to create a distance from what I have to do. It’s why I come here. Different place, different clothes. It’s not the kind of work you want to take home with you.”

“It all sounds a bit serious for selling postcards.”

“I’m talking about my real work.”

There was a look about him when he said that — somewhere between frightened and lethal.

“What am I doing here?” I said under my breath.

“You couldn’t help it.”

He stood up out of his chair. He was long and tight as a guitar string. He turned over the postcard on his desk and wrote something on the back in pencil. “Do you really want to see one of the hand-painted postcards?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said, glancing at the card. “Not if you’ve written your number on it.”

He smiled for a moment, then suddenly stopped. “I don’t need to. You’ll be back. Listen, you go past Friston Street, don’t you, on your way home? Will you post this for me? It’s very important.”

“You’re not clever,” I said. “I’d have to walk past Friston Street to get anywhere.”

“Fine. But will you deliver it?”

He gave me the postcard. I didn’t look at it. “Why should I?” I said.

“How are you feeling?” he said, ignoring my question. “After this morning? Eh? Drained, I bet. It drains you, doesn’t it?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You had an attack, didn’t you? This morning? A blackout. I can tell, because you’re just getting your color back. What did you draw afterward?”

I shook my head and turned to go. “Bugger off, you freak,” I said.

“My name’s Peter Kennedy,” he said. “Pete.”

“Bugger off,
Pete
,” I said.

I began to walk away, and then I turned back. He was standing in the doorway of the hut, the light spilling out around him. “I’m Frances Clayton,” I said. I don’t know what came over me.

“OK,” he said, “I’ll probably speak to you tomorrow.”

“What makes you think that?” I said.

“You’ll need to talk,” he said, and pulled the door shut.

Friston Street was long and quiet. The blossom petals had fallen to rot on the pavement, and the houses looked pale orange in the streetlight. I stopped beneath one of those streetlights and examined the postcard. I shuddered, but I didn’t know why.

He was a talented painter; that much was clear. It was so lifelike, I had to check that the people in it weren’t moving. There was nothing particularly interesting about the subject of the postcard, but the detail — for something so small — was astonishing, and I knew now why he’d been using that little magnifying glass to study it. This was the scene:

A weird, uncanny feeling came over me. I felt sick looking at the painting, but I figured that was what happened when you studied something so small. I’d had a long day.

On the back of the postcard, there was no message, just a name and address, in Peter Kennedy’s surprisingly neat handwriting:
Mr. Samuel Richard Newman, Flat 3, 14 Friston Street, Helmstown, HM4 4TN
. Nothing else.

Suddenly I wanted the thing out of my hands, so I ran up to the door of number 14, dropped it through the letterbox, and carried on down Friston Street, thinking of Peter Kennedy.

I felt a hand on my shoulder and I spun round, gasping. It was Max.

“Bloody hell, Maxi! Don’t creep up on people like that.”

“I thought you’d gone home ages ago,” he said.

“No, I . . . I just went for a bit of a stroll.”

“Are you OK?” he asked. People kept asking me that, because of my blackouts and the mess back home. The truth was I felt like I was coping fine. But I didn’t know what was coming, did I?

I couldn’t sleep that night. It wasn’t so much because of my strange meeting with the man in the beach hut or the drawing I’d done after my blackout — although I’d been so freaked out by the sketch, I’d buried it in my kit bag. Recently when I couldn’t sleep, it was because I didn’t know where my brother was.

So, yes, he’d got into a stupid argument outside a pub and punched an off-duty policeman. Johnny was a boxer and that’s just the way he’d been rewired, through his training. Witnesses said the police officer was unconscious before he hit the ground, and because of this, he didn’t put his hands out to break his fall, so his head snapped back against the pavement. That’s what did the damage.

The time it takes a professional boxer to throw a punch is one-tenth of a second. That’s how long you’ve got to get out of the way. That’s how long it takes to split two lives in half.

Staying in Helmstown, along with this new development in my fainting fits, reminded me of the first time I’d seen Johnny fight. That was also the first time I blacked out. The junior championship bout was taking place at the Hilton Hotel on the Helmstown seafront, on a scalding hot day in August. I was five years old when me and Mum traveled down to watch. Too young, really, for something like that.

Johnny was a youth boxing sensation, and our granddad had high hopes for him. He had a chin of steel, Granddad said. As a little girl, I had once stroked his face and said, “Your chin isn’t made of steel.”

“It’s just a thing folk say,” Johnny had answered. “It means I can take loads of punches.”

“Why would you want to do that?” I’d said.

Even before watching my first fight, I’d seen how our house changed in the days before one. It was all about trying to get Johnny’s weight down. He’d weigh himself twelve times before lunch. He’d ditch the steak-and-egg breakfasts he ate when he was training and the milk shakes that made his farts smell and were named after natural disasters: Cyclone, Whirlwind. He’d replace all that food with . . . nothing. Well, sometimes he’d chew a whole pack of Hubba Bubba and walk around the neighborhood, spitting, because he thought if he could get rid of all his spit, he’d drop a couple of pounds.

Granddad would come and stay with us, and everyone would wake up early and play loud and ridiculous music. In the evenings, we would go to bed when it was still light, but Johnny wasn’t allowed to come to my room and tell me stories. I would wake to the sound of the bathroom scales whirring. I loved Johnny and I didn’t want there to be less of him.

It was as if all of the pipes and cables in the house fed into and out of my brother. As we got nearer to the day of the fight, Mum would become tense and shout at me for nothing, but Johnny would tell me it was going to be OK. “I don’t worry about getting hit, Fran,” he said once. “The worst thing, for me, is having to take my top off in front of all those people.”

There was a fashion, at that time, of giving boxers nicknames from retro films, and they decided to call him Johnny “Top Gun” Clayton.

The seafront was packed on the day of that Helmstown fight. Not many Claytons had been to a Hilton, and me and Mum felt out of place. Auntie Lizzie hadn’t moved to Helmstown yet, and we were staying at Nana and Granddad’s funny little house, just down the coastal road in Whiteslade. So it was odd to walk through the posh, cool corridors of the Hilton and then into this rowdy, darkened ballroom that stank of sweat and cigarette smoke. They’d built a mini grandstand for the spectators to sit in. I remember how the backs of my thighs stuck to the blue folding seats and how the ring, which was so brightly lit, looked like a square swimming pool. I remember thinking that the announcer looked odd standing in the boxing ring in his suit and bow tie. And I remember Mum, with her hair dyed red and her white shirt, as still and straight as the lion statues outside big old buildings.

The theme from
Top Gun
played as Johnny climbed through the ropes, and he wore big reflective aviator sunglasses like they did in the film. Granddad slapped him on the back and took off his glasses. Johnny opened his mouth wide and stuck his tongue out — a little habit he had. I tapped Mum and did an impression of him. She smiled weakly.

Granddad tightened the straps on Johnny’s head guard, took the knotted towel from around his neck, and then tied his bootlaces. That’s when I started to get worried. How was Johnny going to win a fight if he couldn’t even tie his laces?

The other lad was tall and strong. He looked like a man, really. His name was Gary “Basher” Bradley. I felt like you do when you get on a theme-park ride and the wheels start to turn, and you know you’ve made a terrible mistake. When the bell went to signal the start of the first round, the men in front of us stood up, so I couldn’t see. They were cheering for the other guy. “Kill him, Bash!” “Do him!” “Go-o-o on, Basher!” they shouted.

Mum didn’t bother to stand. She just stared into the backs of these men. I climbed on my chair and peered over.

I didn’t know anything about boxing, but I learned quickly, and I didn’t need anyone to tell me Johnny was losing. Basher Bradley had him in the corner of the ring and was pounding him in the stomach. To my relief, Johnny danced away from him and shrugged. He smiled, as if to say, “Is that all you’ve got?” Typical Johnny.

But Bradley had more.

Johnny was trying to protect his stomach, and Bradley landed a right cross (I know all the names of the punches now) on Johnny’s chin of steel. Several things were horrible to me. The first was that Johnny’s gum shield shot out and skidded across the ring. I didn’t know he was wearing a gum shield — I didn’t know what a gum shield
was
— so I thought a piece of Johnny’s jaw had been chipped off. I was too upset to scream. I couldn’t even turn away. When you watch a boxing match, you feel like you’re taking part, especially if someone’s getting a beating. And in some ways, just by being there, just by watching it happen, you
are
taking part, aren’t you?

Anyway, the worst thing about it was that Johnny didn’t go down. He stayed on his feet for another two rounds and took all sorts of punishment. I was the one, in fact, who hit the floor. I caught a whiff of smoke, and the last thing I remember was looking up at the ceiling, beyond Mum, beyond the fat men who were throwing air punches of their own. The ceiling had fancy swirling borders and a chandelier hanging like a bunch of flowers.

During the weeks I spent in Helmstown at Auntie Lizzie’s, I kept thinking back to that day, the fight, and that first blackout. The memories kept intruding: waking up in the bedroom of my Nana and Granddad’s house in Whiteslade; Johnny standing over the bed; the trancelike state I was in; and the sudden urge to draw. I suppose it was natural that I would remember my first blackout so clearly. After all, it changed my life.

With no chance of getting any sleep, I decided I might as well get up and do something semi-constructive. It was pointless, lying there just
thinking
about Johnny.

I always had the hope, especially late at night, that he might have found his way to an Internet café and e-mailed to say he was safe. At around one a.m., I left the spare room and crept around Auntie Lizzie’s big house. It was beautiful, all dark wooden floors and clean cream walls. Books everywhere. It was a world apart from our flat back home. Auntie Lizzie had married Robert, an architect who had his own practice, whereas my mum had married — well — my
dad
, who I’d never even met. “Don’t screw your life up for love,” Mum had always told us.

Our flat was so small, you could barely breathe without waking someone up, but here, there was space and privacy. I sneaked up to the top floor, into Uncle Robert’s study, and turned on his iMac. While I waited for it to fire up, I looked out the window. A black cat with white socks slinked along a low wall outside a house across the street. I’d seen the cat before. It was the one I’d drawn after my last blackout. It looked up at me now, its eyes lit with the reflection from the streetlight. Accusing me. I shuddered and closed the curtains.

There was no message from Johnny, and I didn’t know what to do anymore. I’d called all the guesthouses and B&Bs back home, and the few friends that Johnny had, but they were quick to distance themselves from him now. I’d called them cowards.

I Googled Johnny and tried not to read the old news reports. There was no further information, so I went on Facebook and checked up on my friends back home. Keisha, my best mate, had updated her status four hours earlier: