Things We Say in the Dark Read online

  ‘Sorry. Too many of them around, and I like to keep things special.’

  The instant Sidney said the words, he regretted them. The man’s gaze raked down and up Sidney’s body and his smile split wide; his teeth were straight and white. For a second Sidney thought he had a toothpick between his incisors, but he must have imagined it. He’d been watching too many films. Jesus, next he’d be expecting the guy to take off his leather jacket, unroll a pack of Lucky Strikes from his T-shirt sleeve and clack open a Zippo. Put the cigarette between his teeth. Grin wide and white. Call him a good boy.

  ‘Special, huh?’

  Sidney stood up. This had the disadvantage of revealing more of his admittedly not very lech-worthy body to the man, but at least now they were the same height; Sidney might actually have been in inch taller.

  ‘Write your email down,’ said Sidney. ‘I’ll let you know if anything comes in, okay?’ Anything, anything to get the man out of the shop. The man leaned in – a smell of maleness, aftershave and outside air – and wrote a series of numbers on a piece of scrap paper on the counter.

  ‘You can call me.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Sidney, though what he meant was no.

  ‘Thank you.’ The man’s wink was implied rather than literal. He opened the door and the bell jangled. Memory lurched in Sidney. He had to sit down and count the jigsaw pieces from the start before he could convince himself that the bell over the door was not the same one that had rung in his sleep last night.

  When Sidney’s little brother Cotton had been snatched from his babysitter’s house, no one saw anything. There was no evidence. No trail to follow, breadcrumb or otherwise.

  Police swarmed the house. Days of fingerprint dust and room searches and TV appeals and lists of everyone they’d ever met. Days of interviews with every neighbour and teacher and family friend. Days of badgering the tearful, apologetic babysitter, who had been in the kitchen making the boys a snack and was certain, absolutely certain that she’d locked the front door.

  Cotton’s face was repeated on a thousand posters, pasted on every shop door and lamp post and noticeboard. It was an appealing face, moppet-like, a face made for an easy life. His unexpected curls, his tiny cleft chin. None of it helped.

  Days and days and days. Weeks and weeks. Everything, everything except for Cotton.

  The police set up a tip line, and people called the station every day with information. Now it wasn’t that there were no new leads. There were plenty: an avalanche, a glut. It was a small town; the police brought in officers from other towns, but there was still too much. So many helpful citizens out there, helping. Calling to share every detail they could possibly think of.

  I saw a boy at the shops. He looked a few years older than the missing boy, and his hair was a different colour, but you never know what those kidnappers can do, surgery and all sorts, I wrote down the number plate so you

  My cousin is acting suspicious. I tried to show him a picture of my little son but he didn’t want to look. Don’t you think it’s strange? I think he has something to do with that missing boy

  I overheard a guy walking past my house say something about a boy and a van, I didn’t get his name but I drew his face, you could make posters

  The next morning, Sidney opened his front door, then shivered and closed it again. Summer was definitely over, though he couldn’t remember it starting. He opened the cupboard under the stairs, his mind already on the endless list of tasks that the shop seemed to bring up every day, and stared dumbly at the pile of orange velvet within.

  Coat. Coat. He should have made coffee; his brain felt fuzzed, mossy. But of course his coat wasn’t in the cupboard. It was upstairs, in a stack of cardboard boxes with all the rest of his clothes. He raced upstairs and dug through the boxes, then pulled on the coat. As he pounded back downstairs, without thinking he put his hand in the pocket for his car keys, which he’d left on the hall table beside the phone. He hadn’t worn this coat since the previous winter, and the pockets were tiny time capsules. He pulled out a crumbling piece of gum, three receipts for pumpkin spice lattes – repulsive things they were, just the memory of the smell of them turned his stomach; he’d only bought them because the woman he was seeing at the time was inexplicably obsessed with them – a tissue hard with old snot, a small black button with a snapped thread tangled in its eyes. He put the things on the hall table and picked up his keys instead. Then he put down the keys and picked up the red receiver. It wasn’t silence, he now realised. There was no dial tone, but there was something. Static. A held-breath hum. And somewhere in the distance, just under the sound of his flowing blood, when he pressed the phone hard against his ear and really listened hard, something else.

  By the time he got out to the car, he knew he’d be late opening the shop. But it wasn’t his fault. You have to answer the phone.

  The Rugrats jigsaw had sold almost immediately – and at the ridiculously high price he’d put on it too, almost as a challenge to his customers, some of whom he was actually starting to resent – so Sidney was pretty happy to have found a job lot of retro jigsaws online. The downside was that counting all the pieces was a right pain in the arse. As it was a job lot, too, clearly from the same household and probably forgotten in an attic for decades, there was no way to know for sure that the pieces weren’t mixed between the boxes. What if someone bought a Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles 1,000-piecer only to find that instead of April O’Neil’s face, the only piece left was Marge Simpson’s left shoe? Sidney felt life was far too short to have that conversation. So there was nothing else for it: he would have to make up each jigsaw individually, to check. All nine of them.

  He had just finished making the edge of an Aaahh!!! Real Monsters 800-piecer, the rain was scattering a lullaby on the front window, his favourite song had just come on the shuffled playlist, and he was thinking that life wasn’t such a downer after all, when the bell over the door rang and the 1950s greaser came in. He shook his lapels to get the rain off his jacket; his hair was so slick the rain didn’t seem to have touched it. Sidney held the tip of his tongue between his teeth and gave the man a shut-mouth smile, then carried on with his jigsaw. He felt like he’d been tricked into a role play, but didn’t know how to play something else. He knew he should collapse the jigsaw and put it back in the box. Get to his feet. Pick up a pricing gun or the credit card machine. Something adult-like. But he stayed behind the counter, head bowed, toying with a piece showing Oblina’s inviting, red-painted mouth. That made him think about his ear, which still throbbed from holding the phone for so long. He hoped that wasn’t red too.

  Sidney looked up to steal a glance at the man, but the man was already looking at him, mouth quirked up at the side flirtatiously. He looked as if his clothes covered not a body, but something else. In the shape of a human, but not.

  ‘You been listening?’ the man said, which made it seem like he was asking Sidney if he was listening to him, but Sidney was sure he hadn’t been talking. When he spoke, his face twisted and sagged, mask-like. It was age, Sidney told himself, age and wrinkles and loose skin and a flabby body. He was old. He was old. He was normal and old. ‘On the phone.’ The man motioned to Sidney’s head. ‘Your ear. Looks sore. That’ll happen if you listen so hard. I bet you never thought about not answering.’

  ‘I don’t know what you … I don’t sell phones. I told you that.’

  ‘Noble tradition, it is. Listening. Did you know that Thomas Edison tried to invent a machine that would communicate with the dead?’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘He failed, of course. The dead have nothing to say. And in Italy, another guy – I forget his name – recorded mysterious voices with an old tube radio. Spent his life trying to figure out what they were saying to him. But they weren’t saying much of anything, I bet. Then in Sweden, another guy recorded birdsong in the forest, but when he listened back to the recording it was his mother’s voice saying: Friedrich, can you hear me?’

  ‘
I don’t want—’

  ‘Then in Latvia, another guy made over a hundred thousand recordings of the dead, including his mother. Isn’t that strange? Why is it always the mother?’

  The man stepped closer and Sidney couldn’t help but flinch, jolting the counter so the jigsaw pieces all ticky-tacked down on to his shoes.

  ‘Have you heard of anything like that?’

  ‘I don’t. I don’t. No.’

  ‘Still looking for that phone. Got things to say, you know?’

  The man winked at Sidney. Then, incredibly, he pulled a pack of Lucky Strikes from his pocket and clacked open a Zippo. He put the cigarette between his teeth. He grinned wide and white. Don’t say it don’t say it please please don’t call me a good—

  ‘Call me if you hear anything,’ said the man, and he lit his cigarette and opened the door and the bell jangled. Long after he was gone, Sidney could smell the smoke. His ear ached from the echo of the bell.

  After weeks of people phoning about Cotton, the police had so many tips that dozens of them were working round the clock to investigate them all. It was too much – but nothing could be ignored. The truth was a needle in a stack of needles. The police put a special tip-line phone in Sidney’s parents’ kitchen, so that they could deal with the tips and the police could get on with investigating them. The phone was red and plastic, and when it rang, Sidney’s parents had to answer it and write down the tips in a special folder. And when Sidney’s parents were out, Sidney had to answer.

  At first the tips were okay. Hearing that it wasn’t a policeman’s voice on the end of the phone, but a child’s, people were kind. They spoke softly. Reassured him that Cotton was surely fine, surely would be home soon.

  Listen, darling, I saw a man, can you write this down? He was at the supermarket and he was buying kiddie things. Little boxes of raisins and lollipops and potato waffles and chicken kievs. I bet you like those, don’t you? If you can write it all down and show the policeman—

  The PE teacher at the primary school is strange, don’t you think he’s strange? My boy forgot his kit once and the teacher made him do it in his underpants, it’s just not right, it’s not proper, would you play games with the other boys in your underpants?

  For a while Sidney wrote all the things down in the special folder to give to the police. He wore a pack of pencils down to stubs. But the calls kept coming, all day and all night, and Sidney was almost a teenager now and his parents weren’t there all the time.

  I saw that boy, that missing boy. He was locked in a shed. It was my shed. If you come and look I can show you—

  My dad hurts me and I don’t like it and he could have hurt your brother too and at night he comes into my room—

  I know why your brother got taken and you didn’t. He’s so little, so pretty and sweet, his cleft chin, I wanted to suck it into my mouth—

  Sidney wrote it all down in the special folder. He listened and he wrote it down because someone knew about what happened to Cotton and he couldn’t miss it, he couldn’t miss it if Cotton or the man who took Cotton was on the other end of the phone.

  I had a dream about that little missing boy. He’s near water and he can’t see. I think he’s been blinded. There’s water though, perhaps he’s been drowned? Perhaps someone took him and drowned him? You should check all the water, the river, drains even, he’s definitely blind and drowned—

  I took him. I took Cotton and I put a gag in his mouth and he couldn’t speak any more. But you can, can’t you? Speak to me, little boy. Tell me about how—

  When I was your age a man took me and he hurt me, I need to tell you, I think the man took that boy too, I’ll tell you all the things he did to me, the things he’s doing to that boy, I’ll tell you all of it—

  And then Sidney stopped answering the phone. It rang and he turned the TV up louder and it rang and he put his spongy orange headphones on and turned his tapes right up and it rang and his ears ached and it rang and he burned the special folder in a metal bin in the back garden and it rang and he thought of the cold glass on his back and scratchy fabric on his front and it rang and it rang and it rang.

  Sidney did not answer the phone again. Cotton never came home. And Sidney knew, knew with a certainty that filled his head with a constant sickening buzz, that he had missed the one call that mattered.

  The next day at the shop, Sidney didn’t even pretend to make the jigsaws. He stood and waited with his fingers clutching white on the edge of the counter. He couldn’t stand to look at the thing he’d bought; he’d wrapped it in layers of black bin bags to hide its shape from himself.

  When the bell over the door rang, he knew it was the man. He was barely even pretending to be human now. He had the leather jacket and the greased hair and perhaps at a very quick glance he looked okay. But if you looked for more than a second, the thing inside bumped up wrongly against the inside of his skin, making strange lumps and hollows. His face shifted. When he spoke, his voice came out wet and echoing like from the bottom of a well.

  ‘You got something for me? Something nice?’

  Wordlessly, Sidney held out the package. The man smiled. His teeth were sharp and white.

  ‘Well, now. That is nice.’ The man took the package from Sidney. His nails were ragged as knives and cut straight through the bin bags. They fluttered to the floor, revealing a Nokia 3210, an original from 1999, fully charged and with one phone number saved.

  Sidney kept his gaze down on the counter, not looking, the exact opposite of what he’d done when the man had taken his brother Cotton and he’d hidden behind his babysitter’s orange velvet curtains and watched and done nothing, not even when the man had looked right at the gap between the curtains and said to him—

  ‘You’re a good boy, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sidney.

  ‘This is our secret, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sidney.

  Sidney closed the shop early so he wouldn’t have to drive through the estate in the dark. He drove to his brand-new house, which had no ghosts and no curtains and nowhere to hide.

  He opened the door to silence.

  He picked up the red phone and took it into the cupboard under the stairs.

  He wrapped himself in the orange velvet curtains and sat on the floor.

  He waited for the phone to ring.

  He picked up the red receiver.

  He listened.

  You have to answer the phone.

  There’s a nice rhythm to things here. My cabin, my studio. The shop and the pool. I feel like maybe this could be my life. I mean, why not? What have I got to go back to?

  The thing is, a house is a family, a history, a body – but it’s also a trap waiting to spring. It’s also a lie.

  The City is Full of Opportunities and Full of Dogs

  She falls awake at 6 a.m. to fireworks. Or drums. Or guns. Or, more realistically, someone dragging a heavy suitcase down three flights of stairs. She knows the other residents do that just to annoy her, as they know she’s in the room right by the stairwell. By the time she’s awake enough to identify the sound, it’s stopped.

  She rolls over and tries to sleep, but there’s little point: in half an hour the cleaners will come, every few minutes opening the squeaky door to the supply cupboard and letting it bang shut. She knows the cleaners think she sleeps too late – to them, anything post-dawn is wasting the day – and they’re trying to wake her up on purpose.

  The upside of the corrala, where she is staying, is that all the rooms look into a central, stone-flagged, open-roofed courtyard lined with walkways, meaning no windows to the outside street, meaning it’s shady even in high summer. The downside is that every sound made in the courtyard or any of the rooms reverberates up, off the stone walls and the tiled floor, right to her room on the third level. Everything makes an echo. There’s almost nothing soft or padded in the corrala; no carpet, no easy chair, no cushions. Her mattress is the only soft thing, and every hot night she lies be
tween the bottom sheet and the top sheet like cheap sandwich filling, sweaty and meaty. She wants to leave the window open but it’s big, and it’s right on the walkway, and it’s bad enough that anyone passing could look in and watch her sleeping, but they could easily climb through and be in her room. So the window stays shut, and she sweats.

  She rolls out of bed, walking carefully toe-heel across the floor because she knows that even bare feet make loud thuds on the ceiling of the room below. She has another month here; best not to irritate her downstairs neighbour. In the shower she notices a mark on her upper arm, a sooty smudge like she’s brushed past a dirty wall. She scrubs it off and hopes she hasn’t left a mark on the sheets; she already feels bad that her hair leaves red-dye smudges on the white towels. After one month and fifteen towels, the cleaners haven’t mentioned it, but she still feels the need to reassure them that it’s not period blood. She knows lo siento, and could look up the Spanish for ‘dye’, ‘stain’ and ‘hair’, but the whole situation is too complicated and makes her feel tired, so she does nothing. As she dries herself, she catches a glance of her back in the mirror: it, too, has a sooty smudge, at the base of her spine, like someone has pushed her. She rubs it off with the now-pinkish towel.

  On her way out she collects her meal vouchers, little blue date-stamped tickets she can exchange for her meals at a local restaurant. Today’s day porter is different from yesterday’s day porter, and the day porter from the day before that. She points at the tickets and says dos-zero-uno and does her best idiot-foreigner smile. The cleaners smoke cigarettes as they clean the rooms and she can smell the smoke floating down into the central courtyard. She worries about what the porters and cleaners all think about her, her bloody towels and her lack of Spanish. How they must hate her and bitch about her in the evenings over their cigarettes and vino tinto in the still-warm air.