The One Safe Place (4 page)

"Darren," the boy said, and had to repeat it again before his grandfather's suspicion died down. "You don't mind me hearing. You told me about the sergeant. Tell again, go on."

"What bloody sergeant? What are you on about, lad?"

"You know. The one you got killed when he kept picking on you."

"Keep your voice down. You want your head seeing to, saying things like that about a man."

"It's all right, granda, there's only us. You can tell."

The old man rolled his eyes until he identified his surroundings or at least appeared satisfied with them, then began to push the quilt down and kick feebly at it. "Hey up, then. Get in so you can hear."

"I can hear here."

"Hear, hear and yoicks and tally-ho and chin, chin, old chap." What Darren presumed to be his grandfather's caricature of an officer was so savage that the last word turned into a racking cough, at the eventual end of which the old man wiped his cheeks and chin, not very accurately. "Scuttle off and let me try and sleep. I can't remember. It was just a tale."

"It wasn't. You said." Darren felt betrayed. "He picked on you to go first in a minefield, remember, and you got these twigs in your hand."

"Is that a fact? That was cute of me."

"Yes, and it was dark, but you could see better than him, and you crawled along till you saw this mine on your left, then you stuck the twigs in the ground and pretended they was a mine you'd nearly bumped into, and you went along till you were nearly on top of the real mine and he couldn't see it because you were in the way. Tell what happened to him then."

"Aye, I remember him. Eyes like a spaniel when you'd given her a good kicking. Come here first. Losing me voice. Can't speak up."

The coughing did seem to have affected him. Darren didn't need to go too close; he knew all his grandfather's tricks. He took a step forward, clenching his buttocks, and a door crashed open downstairs. "Darren!"

His grandfather dragged the quilt up. "What's that? Who's got in?"

"It's only da. Your son, granda, Phil." Darren was trying to reassure himself too, but it didn't work. "Darren?" his father was yelling. "Where are you, you little fucker? What have you been up to? There's some cunt and her kid hanging round outside."

"I heard him go in your da's room," his mother yelled.

His father pounded up the stairs, and Darren backed into the room until the pile of junk stopped him. He pressed against it rather than edge toward the bed as his father kicked the door wide. "What did you do?"

"Nothing, da."

"Don't give me that."

Darren knew that whatever he might give his father wouldn't save him. As he saw his father stalking at him he felt as if he'd already been punched in the mouth, but managed to make it say, "I only wanted to hold the rabbit."

His father halted long enough to look disgusted and incredulous. "You what?"

The worst thing Darren could do would be to repeat himself, yet he was unable to stop. "I only wanted to hold the—"

The fist caught the side of his mouth and nose and chin. He felt his jaw shudder and his lips burst against his teeth as he fell among the rolls of carpet, drawing his knees up tight against his stomach and covering his head with his arms. "Aw, Phil, don't be doing that all the time," his grandfather croaked. "Spare the lad a bit of loving now and then."

"We know all about your loving, you dirty old sod." For a moment Darren's father seemed to have been infuriated into kicking Darren even harder than he had already planned to, but then he stamped downstairs. "See to the bitch, will you, Marie," he shouted. "I'm talking."

When the old man hitched himself across the bed and reached for Darren while groaning sympathetically, the boy struggled to his feet and stumbled out of the room. His father had shut himself in again, his mother was marching along the hall, and Darren would have gone down to watch except that he wasn't having Henry and the woman see what had been done to his face. He dodged into the bathroom to grab the toilet roll, the mirror showing him his purple lopsided mouth and the column of blood under his nose, and dabbed at himself as he ran into his bedroom, where he turned the computer keyboard on its face and planted the monitor on top of it, and stood on them to spy through the open transom.

Henry's mother was at the fence, pushing her bracelets along her fat wrists as if they were sleeves she was rolling up while she tried to see into the house. Henry was doing his best to look convinced that nobody could touch him so long as he was with her. When the front door banged open, however, he made to flee until his mother caught hold of him. "What are you hanging round here for?" Darren's mother demanded. "Who do you think you are, a social worker?"

"Does Darren Fancy live here?"

"What if he does?" his mother countered, and more loudly, infuriated at having revealed that much, "Think I'd tell you?"

"He just chased our Henry's teacher's rabbit under a car and pushed Henry over where he hurt his spine last year."

"Liar."

"Our Clodagh and her friends all saw him do it."

"Little liars, the lot of them. See, he daren't even look at me."

"You speak up for yourself, Henry. You tell her." Henry's mother gave the boy a shake that jangled her bracelets, and when he twisted his head farther aside, flicked his ear hard with her fingers. "I'm telling you he knocked Henry on his bum where he's already hurt his back being pushed down a slide, and the rabbit his teacher at school said he wasn't to let anyone else have—"

Darren's mother strode to the gate, her red hair flopping about her head as though better to expose the black roots of its parting. "Want some advice?"

"If you think I came here just—"

"Stuff the rabbit up his bum and see if that makes him better. And I'll stuff something up it for you," Darren's mother said, dragging the gate open with a screech of wood on concrete, "if you don't piss off."

Henry's mother had covered his ears during most of this, and now she moved him along the fence with her hands still over them, as though sliding a jug with a woeful face along a shelf. "Everyone knows about you, Marie Fancy," she said at the top of her voice, perhaps in the hope of attracting some support. "No wonder your Darren's like he is."

"You leave our Darren out of it. Don't you try to tell me how to bring him up."

"We'll see what our Henry's school says about what your Darren done," Henry's mother said, and pushed Henry along the pavement. "They know all about him."

She shouldn't have tried to have the last word, Darren thought, although the outcome might have been the same in any case. As soon as she turned away his mother darted out of the gate and thumped her as hard as she could on the back of the neck. Henry's mother collapsed to her knees, and one of her bracelets flew off. "That's just a warning," Darren's mother cried, and flounced back to the house.

She saw Darren at the transom and brandished her fist at him. When the front door shook the house he was afraid she was going to come up and add to the pain in his face. Nevertheless he watched as Henry ran after the rolling bracelet and caught it once it fell over, and fetched it to his mother. She almost pulled him over in the process of hauling herself to her feet, then staggered away, supporting herself with one hand on his shoulder. Once she was out of sight, and Darren's mother had either forgotten or decided not to come after him, Darren climbed down from his perch.

His face felt invaded and too big, as though the pain had been inserted between it and him, but familiar enough. He hung the earphones from his scalp and switched on the Walkman and lay on the bed, having kicked the quilt onto the floor. When he turned the tape up full, the sound seemed to get between him and the pain. He tore off a wad from the toilet roll and laid it beneath his nose to sop up the blood. After a while the bubbling of his nostril became almost pleasurable, and when the tape ended he lay there breathing and listening to the static, and thought there was nothing he enjoyed more. Hearing that stillness felt like being asleep without needing to sleep.

"Mom, we need to go in now. Everyone is."

"I'm sure we're okay for a few minutes still."

"No, they said it was the last call. What do you think happened to dad?"

"Nothing to look like that about, Marshall. I expect he got held up."

"Or lost."

"That could be Don, true enough. Don't worry, just about everyone in town must know the way here."

"Suppose he had an accident?"

"Don't suppose quite so much, honey. I think his driving's getting pretty near as good as mine. You don't have accidents by being too careful."

Susanne leaned out past the New York Interstate 190 sign and gazed along the street as a car as red as Don's swung around the curve, but it wasn't his—not even a Volvo. "Let's go in, then. They'll send him to us when he shows up," she said, and followed Marshall past a NYPD car.

Beyond it was a yellow school bus, and a line of phone booths next to a 5th Avenue and East 42nd sign overlooked by an illuminated Baskin-Robbins billboard and one for Coca-Cola up which waves of red light were rising. But the phones in the booths were British, as was the rest of the small theme park that belonged to Granada Television, and the interior of the studio building was even more of a jumble of locations. Along a corridor which contained one side of Downing Street, railings and all, the Travises came to a room full of furniture so large that Susanne would have needed help to climb onto a chair. A dressing room crowded with period costumes provoked Marshall's secret smile which tugged his small mouth leftward and half closed his bright blue eyes, an expression which she was never sure whether he'd consciously learned from his father. Ahead was the illuminated plaque of the studio, outside which a young woman with the waist of her long skirt pulled up almost to her breasts was glancing at the Travises over a clipboard. "You'll be... ?"

"Not too late, I hope."

"Ah, Mrs. Travis. And son." The studio assistant had apparently gathered all this from Susanne's accent, and inscribed two ticks on her list with a pencil bearing a rubber cat's head. "Some of your students are here, and—yes, well, we'll have you down the front, I think."

"I don't suppose my husband beat us to it?"

"If he's not here he can't be here," the young woman assured her, tapping the name above the pair she'd just checked off. "Why did we want him, did we say?"

"He's a bookseller."

"That wouldn't be it. Unless," the assistant said hopefully, "he's been in trouble with the police?"

"Not even a ticket as of this morning."

"Is he American too?"

"That's for sure."

"Maybe that was it. We'll have to leave a space for him at the back." The assistant steered Marshall past herself, and looked ready to wield Susanne's elbow too. "Travis family. One missing," she told the floor manager who flustered to meet them.

Several wide rows of seats full of people and noise faced an expanse of floor planted with cameras and lights. Quite a few of the people were already red-faced with arguing or with eagerness to do so. Four of Susanne's students were sitting together on the top row, and three of them waved to her—Elaine appeared too embarrassed to acknowledge her as the floor manager indicated seats on the front row with a sweep of his open upturned hands, one of which he then used to rub out some of his frown. Susanne took the seat beside two women in track suits who gave her grey suit and black tights an unimpressed glance each; Marshall shared part of his place with a man who seemed committed to discovering how much space his legs could encompass. As Susanne tugged her skirt over as much of her knees as it covered, a man in a suit which was apparently designed to be a size too big for him strode out from behind the cameras, and the assistant with the clipboard closed the door.

The younger members of the audience whistled and cheered and stamped their feet to celebrate the emergence of the presenter, and their lead was followed by an aggressive theme which sounded almost as though it was being performed by an orchestra as the presenter reappeared, having taken a turn around the cameras and lights. The floor manager wafted the applause higher with the hand that wasn't flattening his forehead, and the younger set went even wilder as the music withdrew in defeat. The floor manager patted the uproar down with both hands, and the presenter turned to the cameras and shot his cuffs. "Violence," he said.

Someone determined to have the last noise or unable to contain it emitted a shrill whistle, but the presenter ignored it. "At this very moment someone in Britain is being raped or mugged or murdered. Last week the whole community was shocked by the case of the nine-year-old whose sister was knocked down by a speeding Ferrari and who went up on a bridge over the Manchester rush hour with some of his friends and dropped a concrete block on the first Ferrari they saw..."

"Wasn't that yesterday?" Marshall whispered.

"Not by the time we're transmitted," Susanne said in his ear.

"The Home Office reports that violent criminals are getting younger and younger. Police are resigning because they say they're losing the fight against violence. Are we spending too much time and money trying to understand it? How much of it is caused by what we let people watch? How can we stop it being beamed into the country by satellite? How far should ordinary innocent people be allowed to go in order to protect themselves and their family? What signals should we as a society be sending to criminals? Just some of the questions I'll be discussing with the audience here tonight," the presenter said, and swung around. "So let me start by asking—what are the causes of violence?"

Only his eyes were moving in his round stubble-topped face. Their darting halted as he flung out his right hand. "Yes, there, no, girl at the back."

It was Rachel, one of Susanne's students, for whom a technician was fishing with a microphone. "I don't know what people watching films on satellite has to do with me and my friends being afraid to go out at night," Rachel said. "I should think they'd be home watching them."