Mikey legs it. He stumbles, trips down the narrow stairs, falls onto the landing. Exhilaration powers him to his feet, eyes dart between the chessboard of a hall beneath him, the stairway up to the nursery above him and to his left, the wall where there was once a way through to the tower. His teeth bite his lip. He’s as stiff and as still as if he was playing musical statues. He listens like a hare listens.
‘Michael! Mikey? Can you hear me? I’m trapped and I need rescuing! Are you coming to get me?’
It’s a silly sing-song voice like she’s two years old. If he could sing back, he would. No. You’re on your owny-oh. He’s locked her in, he can’t believe it, he’s locked her in. He didn’t plan to, it was just that she was in there and he was out here and it suddenly came to him that all he had to do to win was slam the door. So he did. Bang. Crash. Gone.
‘Michael! It’s a good joke, but you need to let me out now. It’s not funny. I’ll miss my appointment at the doctor’s.’
But it is funny. It’s very funny. In his bedroom, he jumps up and down on the bed, waving his plastic sword over his head in triumph, and he proclaims his great victory to the circus animals who now understand why they had to move house. Actually, that isn’t quite true because when he did it he didn’t even know this was going to happen, but looking back, it all makes sense. He’s a fortune teller, or what was it Edmund called the sampler girl because she knew about the earthquake two hundred years before it happened? A prophet. He doesn’t know what the difference is and he doesn’t care, he’s probably both. When they got back from the wildlife park he moved the circus animals and got loads of biscuits and stuff from the kitchen, not because he was going to lock her up, but because he was going to lock himself in. He was planning to hide in his room and barricade the door with the chest of drawers like he did once before. At least until Edmund got back. That way he’d be safe, because he wasn’t safe with her; there was something cruel about her recently that he sensed. The only problem was he’d dropped Gorilla somewhere and that was why he was searching the nursery. Gorilla is very important, he is his bodyguard, and he needs one of those.
When Edmund went away, to start with she was almost nice and he was almost sorry for her, because she cried when Edmund left just like he did, but then she did the worse thing she could ever have done and he is never ever going to forgive her for that, and if she’s the sort of person that tells lies just to get Solomon locked up then she must be the sort of person who could do anything. And lie about anything. He already knows what a liar she is, she’s made everyone think it was him to blame for what happened. People like that stop at nothing, that’s what his mum said except she wasn’t talking about Diana. Although he spent a lot of time thinking of punishments for her, mostly based on Lockdown, he hadn’t really come up with one that would work in the real world and now it’s just sort of happened without him even thinking. She’s in there locked up and he’s out here, in charge of everything.
It was the trip to the wildlife park that did it. First of all, there was the nice woman who parked her car next to theirs; his aunt kept him away from people usually, but she couldn’t do that, not somewhere like the wildlife park, and that woman was very kind, helping her little girl get her arm through the sleeve of her yellow anorak, and for one moment he thought he had found a way to escape and because it was so close and so possible, he realised how much he wanted to get out. He could say to the woman, this is my aunt who is horrible to me, can I come home with you? But he no longer had any idea if he could still speak. Sometimes he stood in front of the mirror in the bathroom, opened his mouth into a little O to see if anything came out, but someone always stopped it, calling up the stairs, or saying it was teatime. They stole his words. Even if the words came back, would anyone believe them? Diana hasn’t actually done a crime against him. When they got back to the car, Diana was weird and the other family had left and he’d missed his chance.
The animals at the park understood him. The orang-utan squatting on the dead branch on the other side of the netting, playing with a piece of fruit in his long fingers, his eyes like the pool under the bridge, reflecting everything back at him. If you were an animal, which animal would you be? They did that at school. He said he would be a monkey, not a zoo monkey, but a king of the jungle monkey, hanging by one elastic-band arm from the tallest trees and hooting to scare the snakes away. That was in another school in another town a long time ago and he hadn’t turned out to be that sort of monkey at all. They caught him and locked him up before he had a chance. In the reptile house, he didn’t know why, all the way through the black tunnel, she held his hand, past the alligators pretending to be logs and the chameleons pretending to be leaves and the lizards as false as plastic toys; everyone was pretending, his aunt was pretending to be nice, he was pretending to have fun. Past great tanks of shifting weed they went and the luminous fish said O to him from the other side of the glass, and then from one world to the next, they were out in the light and dropped hands. There was a lake on one side where she stood studying the swans and a cage on the other where he stood studying the wolves, the she-wolf in particular, imagining the fleas feeding on her skin beneath the lank grey hair. Her eyes were green and mean, it didn’t even really look like they were seeing you, but only the flesh beneath your T-shirt. Beyond the high fence, the other wolves were lying in the sun on the rocks and thin brown grass, but this wolf was on her own, prowling the length of the wire, teeth bared and biding her time. ‘This she-wolf has been temporarily separated from the pack because she attacked her cubs. She will be reintroduced when the cubs are a little older. Do not feed.’
Since Edmund left, there was no fence left between him and his aunt.
One last chance he had, when she was ill and he was making swans with the man outside the first aid room, who went on and on talking to him even though he never talked back. Mostly he’d hoped she was so ill she would die and then Edmund would have to come back and look after him, or even if she was just very ill, someone else would be called, he thought they’d ring Grace. When the man called Donald came out with her, he was so sure that was what was going to happen, everyone must see that a woman like that couldn’t look after children, and then Donald said that he wasn’t to worry, his aunty was fine and they were going to buy some circus animals in the shop as a treat because he’d been so good. He burst into tears and everyone thought it was because he was happy. What if he’d said something then? Or even written something down? He didn’t have his whiteboard, but there were felt-tips and paper in the activity box they’d found for him. I don’t want to go home with her. That’s all he’d have to write. Tell an adult, that’s what they always said at school. But then they’d ask why and they wouldn’t believe him and she’d be even more angry and when they got back to Wynhope it would be even worse than ever before.
In the shop it was like someone had turned the sound up, and for the first time for a long time Mikey was aware of everyone talking to each other. It looked so easy, like when you can’t ride a bike yet and someone else can and off they go, pedalling, not even wobbling. He was jealous and he was frightened, all mixed up.
In the back of the car on the way home, she thought he was sleeping, but he wasn’t. His heart was beating very fast. You don’t get more than three get-outs on Lockdown and he’d lost of all them. They’d be home soon, she’d shut the front door, nobody would come to see them, she’d probably torture him and murder him because he’s seen on the news that’s what some people do to children, and then he’ll be dead and no one will know and his mum will be sad and Edmund will come home and she’ll probably have hidden his body so Edmund will think he’s run away and he won’t even come looking for him. On and on his mind careered into panic, gathering catastrophes as it went, and they clung to his fear so that the snowball grew until it was as cold and big as the whole world and bigger.
‘Michael, come back. I know you’re outside the door.’
But here he is all in one piece. The winner. She’s shouting now. With his heart pounding, he wriggles out onto the landing like a commando then sits, leaning against the banisters, his knees pulled tight to his chest. She rattles the door handle then stops. Rattles and stops. In between, the house is very quiet, there are sounds, the ticking and tocking of the grandfather clock, the click of Monty’s nails on the hall floor, the thud of blood pumping round his skull, but the silence is louder than all of them. He waits. He jumps. A short attack on the lock, rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat. Monty pushes his hands away from his face and noses his cheeks, and Mikey feels the warm and stinky breath of another living thing. The dog lies down beside him, head on one side, also alert to the invisible performance being played out upstairs.
‘Michael!’
Breaking free from the boy’s hand on his collar, Monty barks once, and getting no answer, turns a few circles and settles down again.
‘I know you’re out there with the dog. I can hear you.’
Monty’s always been on his side.
‘Michael, I know things have been awful, but I’ve been ill. That’s what happened at the wildlife park. I’ve got an urgent appointment at the doctor’s.’ Her voice is coming down the stairs. ‘I’m so sorry, I’m sorry.’ A pause. ‘I need to go to the doctor.’
Even Monty is worried, but it doesn’t last long and he isn’t taken in by it either, he rolls over onto his back as an invitation for Mikey to tickle him and as they rag and play she’s up there banging her head against the wall like he does sometimes, so they play a little harder and she bangs a little harder until she starts up again as if she’s pulled herself together.
‘I know you’re cross with me, but this isn’t the way to sort things out. You can’t just lock people up, you know. I’m not well, you can’t.’
But you did. And I can. I have. Mikey is jiggling up and down, not just because he is triumphant, but because he really needs a pee and dares not leave the landing until he knows for sure that she can’t escape.
‘Let me out, Michael. I don’t want to call the police. You’d be in a lot of trouble and I don’t want that.’
Her phone. On Lockdown that would be a fatal error. It’s on the hall table. Three messages. He’s learned her password by watching her fingers, that’s how people get your cash machine number and steal your money. The first message is something about winter fashion, the second is from the health club, reminding her to pay, and the last is from Spotless Angels. ‘Hope it’s OK, we will be at Wynhope at 10am on Friday, not 11. Hospital appointment.’ That’s tomorrow, which is ages away. He doesn’t know what will have happened by tomorrow, but he knows he doesn’t want them here, they come all the time and never notice anything. He texts back: ‘Please don’t come Friday. Thank you.’ Dancing on the spot, he waves the phone in the air like a scalped head. She will be really, really, really unhappy not to have her phone, and he’s really, really, really happy to have it because he can use it whenever he wants. As he puts it down, he spots the card with the word ‘Police’ on the top. Carefully he reads what it’s all about then feeds it into the shredder in Edmund’s study; they’re no good either, arresting the wrong person. He’s reached the next level. He can do anything in the world he wants to now she’s in there and he’s out here: his fishing rod is in the passage, he can go to the river for as long as he likes; the air gun is in the cupboard, he can just take that and kill things if he wants to. If he feels like it. Like this. He finds a packet of chocolate digestives and stuffs two of them in his mouth at the same time, gives one to the dog, stuffs another two into his jeans pocket. What else? Anything. Everything. Once he’s certain she can’t break out. Outside, he takes the long way round via the stables flat so he ends up hiding behind the swing tree. From there he can spy on the nursery. One front window is open, her head is poking out, her hands around the metal struts, and he remembers Gorilla, poor Gorilla. There are no bars on the windows on the other side, perhaps Gorilla could parachute his way to freedom. Picking at the bark of the tree, he waits and he watches. She must be thinking about calling out, but they both know nobody will hear her from there and nobody will come up the drive and rescue her, because nobody visits Wynhope any more, she’s driven them all away. That’s what he heard Edmund say once: ‘You’ve driven everyone away.’
The best Greek myth in the book Edmund bought for him is the one about Cyclops. He can be like Odysseus and call himself ‘Nobody’, then when all the people ask Diana who locked you up in the attic, she will say ‘Nobody’ and they’ll all say you’ve only got yourself to blame. This is boring. On television when police do surveillance, they have partners who sit in the car with them and smoke cigarettes, then one of them usually nips off for a burger just when the murderer turns up, but here it’s just him on the job, except for Monty who appears at the back door, sniffs, then charges over the lawn wagging his tail and giving away his hiding place.
‘Michael, I can see you there. Come up here now. The game’s over now. It’s not funny . . . please,’ she screams.
In reply, he dances on the lawn in front of her like he’s just won something huge and everyone is cheering and taking photographs of him and wanting interviews, then he runs for cover into the kitchen, laughing so hard he finds he cannot stop and he’s not so far from crying. Having collapsed on the sofa, he turns on the television and what’s on is a programme about what you can find in your attic. One woman is talking about jigsaws, how people don’t realise that some of them are valuable and she shows an Elvis jigsaw, just like theirs. You have to have all the pieces for it to be worth anything. Their jigsaw was worth something. If Sarah had brought it back to him then he could have finished it, from the sparkly suit all the way down to the guitar in the bottom left-hand corner. People thought Elvis was dead but he probably isn’t. Tears stream down his face. He suddenly feels so lonely that he finds himself to be like a jigsaw, sliding slowly to the floor and cracking into pieces – legs, arms, heart, head, brain, voice, falling apart. How he will never sit with her again to put the pieces together. How there will never be anyone to sit with him again. Not like that. Not like this. Not like anything. He’s on his own.
The ring of Diana’s mobile phone stirs him. Rubbing his eyes, wiping his snotty nose on the bottom of his T-shirt, it takes a few seconds to orientate himself in the sitting room, now lit only by random flickers from the television. He remembers what he’s done. The curtains are open, but it’s dark outside and the room is full of indoor shadows. Monty will know if she’s out there, but the dog lazily puts a paw up on his knee and growls in a way that means it’s past supper time. He loves this dog. The text message on her mobile is only from the cleaners.
‘No problem. Thx for letting us know. We will come again next week.’
Having pulled the curtains so the night can’t get in, Mikey puts on the lamp, turns on the chandelier in the hall, goes to each and every room, even to the drawing room, and lights up the house like Christmas, so the burglars and the crows will see someone’s home, and then he creeps up the stairs and holds his breath. She’s still in there. He’ll have to let her out soon, at least before bedtime, but maybe not yet. The truth is he doesn’t know quite what will happen if he lets her out.
Supper is everything he likes, except none of it tastes quite as good as he hoped. Afterwards, Mikey is brave enough to open the back door just a fraction to let the dog out. He leaps into the evening, barking at the place where the badger crosses the lawn. Monty’s never scared of anything except for thunder, it must remind him of the earthquake. What if there’s another earthquake? What if the house falls down? What if he is crushed and nobody finds him? The what ifs are running down the hill in his brain faster and faster, their arms waving, their legs buckling unable to stop.
‘Monty! Michael! Michael!’
That puts the brakes on. Monty has triggered the security lights and they’ve lit up the bronze boy and woken her up as well.
‘For God’s sake, you can’t leave me up here all night. I’m not well. That’s what happened at the wildlife park, I realised I wasn’t well. I know I haven’t been very nice for a long time, but it’s because I’m ill. Call an ambulance. Call nine-nine-nine.’ Her voice is getting higher and higher like singing practice. ‘There’s no bulb up here. Please, don’t leave me in the dark, I hate the dark. Oh God, oh God.’
He knows the bulb has gone; it popped soon after Edmund drove away. Edmund would have put a new one in, but he couldn’t ask her so he’s been playing in the dark. Paul used to take the bulbs out on purpose. He doesn’t think his mum would like what he has done and for the first time he worries that she’ll be cross with him. They said that, didn’t they, the forensic people, that the lights were turned off on the spiral staircase.
‘I can’t sleep up here, there’s no bed. It’s not funny any more.’
She’s right. It isn’t funny any more. In the hall, he sits on the bottom stair where he sat once before, a very long time ago when he was just as scared as he is now except Edmund was there, even though he didn’t know Edmund then, not very well. He has a plan. If he waits until she falls asleep, then he can open the nursery door very quietly, just an inch, then run as fast as he can down to his room and shove the chest of drawers across the door. He’ll need to hide because she’ll be like a beast, like something from the wildlife park when she gets let out, like the she-wolf with fleas and fangs and hunger and snarling. Two things occur to him: first, it would be a good idea to prepare his room now, to get the barricade ready because it’s not easy to move the furniture, and to get more food and stuff, he needn’t worry about water because he’s got the little bathroom next door; second, he wonders if he might have time when she’s asleep to sneak into the nursery and find Gorilla. When he was very small he used to play a game with his mum. She would put on a blindfold and curl up tight in the middle of the floor with a jam jar beside her. Then they’d say together: ‘Isn’t it funny how bears like honey. Buzz, buzz, buzz. I wonder why she does.’
It was his job to creep up on his mum and steal the jar and he nearly always got away with it. Just sometimes she’d catch him, grab him by the ankle and roar and chase him round their little sitting room and out through the French windows and into the garden until they had to be sensible because Paul would be back from work soon.
It’s probably not possible to rescue Gorilla. Not today. What’s worse is that Monty cannot hide with him either because Monty needs fresh air, and although that means both of them will be lonely, at least Monty will be his guard dog on the outside. He can trust him to do that.
Everything is ready. Each step on the nursery stair holds its fingers to its mouth and tells the next to be as quiet as possible; they are his stairs, they are on his side. At the top, he listens with his eyes as well as his ears; they scan the little landing and the wooden doors as if they can see sound. Because it’s dark she’s probably fallen asleep already, she won’t know the time or that it’s too early for bed. The key is in the pocket of his jeans, his hand is shaking, and he has trouble getting it to fit the lock. It rattles the door.
There is an explosion of noise. It seemed like a good plan, but the pounding and shrieking are the sounds of a prisoner this close to breaking out and he does not know what he will do if she escapes and beats him down the stairs. She is no longer just battling with the handle, she is battering the door itself. It’s going to shatter, and he’s trapped within a horror film of his own making.
And the words. Hate. You wait. Edmund. Never forgive. Police. Prison. Should have pushed you in the river. Better off dead.
The chest of drawers scrapes across the floor, inch by inch, so heavy, but finally the barricades are up and he waits for what he thinks is a very long time. He can never let her out, not when she’s like that, he’d never get away in time. She’s much, much worse than he thought she’d be. Now what? Somehow the now what slowly loses its question mark and becomes just a thing, maybe a row of dots like you get sometimes at the end of a chapter in a book. . . . Like that. And finally, at the end of the row of dots and with Monty whining at the door, Mikey thinks he can risk coming out. She might think he’s a little kid playing a trick, but he’s not, he’s old beyond his years, that’s what people say about him. He’s made sense of things a little bit. He never meant to do it, he’s not done anything wrong on purpose, he’s only making sure she can’t attack him.
When you’ve got such a long time and you don’t know what to do with it, the best thing is the computer. In Edmund’s study, he reaches level four of Lockdown and eats cold baked beans, but he does put them in a bowl because his mum says only slobs eat out of the tin. Some fall on the carpet, the dog eats them, but even so they leave little orange spots which smear and get worse when he scrubs at them with a kitchen cloth. Counting with the striking clock, he gets all the way to nine. He’s going to have to spend the night alone, that’s clear. He should go to bed, but how can he with her up there and him down here? He’s got the computer, he likes the screensaver with its picture of the river, autumn, the trees on the banks are all golden and the heron is standing like a statue on the weir. Edmund says the salmon swim the wrong way up the river to get home, thousands of miles they swim to get home, and there are some who are not strong enough to jump over the rapids and those are the ones the heron is waiting for. Sometimes when he’s by the river playing, he pretends he’s the heron and sometimes he’s the salmon. He wastes a bit more time checking his aunt’s boring emails. None of them are from friends, they’re all about things you can buy, but at least none of them say anything about anyone coming to Wynhope. Then he goes to Google and searches what happens to people locked up.
He knows a bit about prisons already. His mum took him to visit Solomon once, she must have wanted the company. He thought they might meet Paul if they left their new town, but she said when would he believe it: Paul has gone for ever. There were sniffer dogs, endless locked doors to get to the next level, waiting with nothing to do, and hardly any toys even though it was meant to be a family day, and how long now and his mum angry with everyone and everything and not much to talk about even when you got in. Who will visit Solomon now? Because of Diana, he must be back in that horrible place. His mum was right: no one did listen to Solomon’s side of the story, no one believed him. The police just saw him at the window and looked the other way. It wasn’t just his mum, he should have been able to rescue Solomon as well. Although he should feel bad about locking Diana up, he doesn’t; it’s his way of correcting the balance, and when she says sorry, then he’ll let her out. That’s a good idea. He’ll put a piece of paper under the door asking her to say sorry for everything and then he’ll let her out if she promises to be nice. He isn’t sure when he’ll do that, probably in the middle of the night just to be safe, or maybe first thing in the morning.
Some of the sites he finds on the internet are newspaper articles and easy to understand because he’s got a reading age of 11.9; they tested him for everything when Diana took him to his new school, but they never asked any of the questions that mattered.
Woman, 37, free after 19 years of slavery.
Miracle: missing twins found in basement 9 years after their disappearance.
Most of the people locked up seem to be in America. The stories are all about good people locked up by monsters, none of them are about monsters locked up by good people. He can look for his mum for ever and never find her.
Other pages are more complicated. Experts writing about what happens to people who are held captive: how they go mad and start talking to themselves; how they imagine things that aren’t there; how they might become violent or hurt themselves. Many of the peculiar P words are gobbledegook – psychosis, pseudo-hallucination, phobia – but it takes ages for people to go this crazy and start seeing things and killing themselves so he doesn’t think the P things will happen to her in just one day, or one night, except she’s got what Edmund would call a ‘head start’ as she’s a bit mental already. The thought of her up there getting madder and madder is frightening. He types ‘mad people locked up’ into Google images and clicks on a black-and-white picture of a skull sort of woman behind bars. It starts moving, her hands come through the bars towards him and away, towards him and away. Mesmerised, he’s drawn to the insanity. Maybe it’s a film, maybe it’s real, maybe it’s a film about a real thing, he doesn’t know, all he knows is that he understands it, and although the caption is complicated, it seems to understand him.
Madness, as you know, is like gravity. All it takes is a little push.
Torn between going to his bedroom and staying up all night downstairs with the television on, not just because he can, but because he isn’t sure he can do anything else, he is simultaneously restless and paralysed. All the old DVDs are pulled out of the cabinet. This one is Titanic. Like an archaeologist, he lifts it very carefully and turns it over. It is an object which carries great meaning. He won’t choose Titanic. There’s nobody’s hand to hold any longer when it gets too close to the end. On the television he selects the film channel. There are things he’s not allowed to watch and he knows the password so he could, but in the end he chooses the family entertainment section and then Jungle Book. He watches that all the way through to the end and then creeps out into the hall, sees it’s only 11.25 and that just like the alley running past the back of the pub at home, the night ahead is long and full of shadows, so he watches the film all over again, even when the music stops and the names creep down the screen and it ends. There should be someone to close up downstairs, tuck him in, leave the landing light on and the door not quite closed, someone to kiss him goodnight. He wants his penguin. Nothing that mattered was in the box they brought from home. These memories are not invited, but they’re arriving anyway: dragging her bulging wheelie case down the stairs at home, his mum asking him if he wants to take Penguin and him saying he isn’t having no snobby aunt thinking he’s a baby. Perhaps if he had brought Penguin to Wynhope, none of this would ever have happened. Perhaps if he hadn’t left Gorilla in the nursery, it wouldn’t have turned out like this.
A solution to his wakefulness occurs to him. On the side table is an empty wine glass with her lipstick on it. Like the Cyclops she seemed a bit wobbly when he pushed her, which might be why she fell over so easily. Whisky is what Edmund has as his little nightcap. The light bounces off the glass as if it is made of diamonds, the whisky glows like Harry Potter magic but smells so strong the fumes slap him in the face and make his eyes water. Lifting the decanter with both hands, Mikey pours the whisky into the sort of glass that Edmund chooses and pours about the same amount that Edmund pours, but because it tastes like medicine he puts sugar in it and then drinks it all in one go and then has another for the road, like Edmund does, even though he isn’t going anywhere. It worries him to leave all the lights on downstairs because when they argue Edmund shouts at Diana that they’re not made of money and Mikey doesn’t want the electric to run out. He wouldn’t know how to top it up without a post office card, but he thinks just one night will be all right. Just one night. Much to Monty’s delight, the dog is invited to sleep upstairs with him.
Mikey doesn’t do his teeth, Mikey doesn’t get undressed, Mikey doesn’t read. The ceiling is treacherously thin and the creaking floorboards and incoherent muttering feed him information on her every move. When the noises stop, the bedroom walls torment him, lurching unsteadily around him, and the floor tips, as if the earthquake is returning. Soon everything will fall in upon itself and his legs will be found sticking out of the rubble, pale and shiny like a plastic doll. The vomit goes all over his duvet. The dog jumps off and leaves him, curled up and shivering, a sick child. He is ill. He will probably die. Diana will die too. Edmund will come home and find both of them dead.