The next morning, Dad shouts up the stairs, ‘Has anyone seen my razor?’
Mum shouts back of course not, and then they start yelling. Mum comes into my room with the biggest frown on her face.
‘Have you taken your dad’s razor? It must be one of those three-bladed-diamond-encrusted ones from the fuss he’s making.’
‘I’m not making a fuss!’ Dad has heard her from the stairs. ‘It’s the only one I have, and some of us are trying to get to work. One of you has been shaving your armpits with it or whatever you do – why can’t you just say so!’
We hear him stamping about, then the slam of the bathroom door. Mum makes a face. ‘Have you seen it?’ she asks. ‘You were doing something funny in there yesterday – I’ve never seen so many towels used, and there was a ring round the bath like you’d been washing rescued seabirds. Nothing’s wrong is it?’
My heart starts thumping. I haven’t cleaned it properly, though I scrubbed it for hours. ‘Nothing!’ I say. ‘Nothing; I used some of that tan stuff, sorry.’
Mum looks at me and sighs. ‘Hmm,’ she says. ‘He’ll have to go to work with stubble – and don’t you look so amused. It’s all secrets with you, isn’t it?’
In assembly, the police are there. A tall, grey-haired man and a woman. They warn us about going out alone because there’ve been more attacks: two girls down by the marina and a boy late at night in town.
‘The young man is seriously injured,’ the policeman says. ‘We want you all to be aware, and to call us if you see or hear anything suspicious.’
I did phone the police once, when Sam was having a go at Mum. He had her cornered in the kitchen, screaming at her like he wanted to kill her. All they did was ask to speak to Mum, but all she said was that I’d made a mistake. I wouldn’t bother again.
I remember this later when Mr Graves gives us his writing topic. He looks just like a stork with his long neck and hooky little nose, and paces the front of the classroom with carefully placed steps, as though he might step on something sharp.
‘Write about your weekend,’ he says. ‘If it’s boring, make something up. I don’t mind that, it’s what we all do, unless it’s just me? But then again, I spent most of last night painting the dining room. Haha…’
I have a vision of him up a ladder – a pot of paint above, wife below. She wouldn’t see him as an English teacher but as a man. Wonder if she regrets marrying him.
I look down at my exercise book and smile. I could write about letting Banks into the house – that would be honest – but everyone would think I was lying. I imagine Joe in his English lesson, trying to disguise the secrets I know he has but won’t tell me yet. So many secrets, secrets, secrets.
Instead I put my head on the desk and sigh. We’ve done this topic before. I remember the last time quite well. I wrote about Sam. The truth.
He’d come home and thrown a chair right across the room at Mum, just missing her face. It crashed into the sideboard instead and broke an antique plate. Later on, he’d demanded that I give him some money. Dad was sitting in a chair across the room and I looked over at him, but he didn’t move, just sat there. I was up against the wall, heels touching the paintwork, and Sam had hold of my wrist, twisting it. Then he raised his fist and whacked me on the side of my face, so hard it was like an explosion. I saw stars just like in a cartoon and everything went silent in my head. Sam smiled into my face, gave my wrist a final twist, let me go and walked out. Dad still did nothing, just let him do it; sat there like nothing had happened at all.
He didn’t do anything later on either, because the house was dark and he was asleep. Sam let himself in with his key and climbed up the stairs, thumping and banging, swearing and muttering, and he came to my room like he’d done before, only this time I’d forgotten to block the door.
‘’Ello Corinne…’ he said.
He was a huge, dark shape against the light from the passage, lurching against the doorframe, staring at me.
‘I was asleep,’ I said, and my heart jumped in my chest like a bird at a window. The alcohol stink seeped into the room like snakes and he came in and sat on the bed, making me wait. It would either be blows, or questions that had no answer, and he’d ask them over and over again, hissing in the gloom with his hand twisted in my hair until it tore from my head. There’d be another sound too – the sound of no one coming.
I didn’t hand it in, of course. They don’t really want the truth. So I grip my pencil and lie again: ‘Yesterday, I went with my parents to a relative’s house where we had lunch…’
The next day is tense. Mum and Dad are having one-of-those-days when the past gets too big to ignore. It’s coming up to a year soon – Sam died at the end of last November. They’ll want me to do what they do. They’ll want me to cry. They’ll want me to visit the grave to talk about how tragic it all was, but I’ll only be glad. Glad he’s gone. How do you admit a terrible thing like that?
When I get upstairs, the door of Sam’s room is ajar; someone has been inside. I stand outside and listen, but there’s nothing – just a gurgle of running water from the bathroom behind me. I look at the door again, touch it, and listen to it squeak. The same squeak I’ve been hearing for years. I push a little further and step inside. Not too far in – I want to be able to hear if anyone comes so I can get out quickly. I don’t want anyone to find me there.
It’s very quiet, only a couple of cars going past outside. The bed, which for a long time used to be made up as if he might be coming back at any moment, is now stripped. It could have been like that for months, or only just today. Perhaps today is the day when Mum puts his sheets in the washing machine when they aren’t even dirty. Or perhaps it’s the first time she won’t. She’ll just put them away and leave the mattress bare. Mum’s moods break and change like clouds. You have to watch her face like the sky.
I let my breath out and twist round, looking but not touching. I’d rather my feet were off the floor too, really. I couldn’t say why. It’s not like death is catching or anything, is it?
There isn’t much to see; someone cleared up the bottles and the mess a long time ago. It’s not even really like his room. There’s a pair of boots and a single trainer behind the door, and above his desk there’s a poster of a Hell’s Angel on a motorbike with the words ‘Live fast, Die young’ written in letters shaped like knives. Apart from that it’s just a few books and a plant that looks like it’d rather be anywhere but here, if it had a choice.
Last of all, just as I’m about to go, I see a chess piece lodged against the skirting board. Dad taught both of us to play when we were little, but I was better at it than Sam and he hated that. He used to hide the pieces when I was halfway through a game, and one day he took the chess set and I never saw it again. It was lost and never replaced, like a lot of other things. I put my hand out to pick the piece up, but find I can’t. I leave it where it is – a little wooden knight without his companions. My heart beats very fast and the blood pounds in my ears, swoosh, swoosh, swoosh…
‘Mum, Sam took my chess set.’
‘Well, I’m sure he’ll bring it back. Don’t make trouble, Coo.’
‘I’m not making trouble. He takes my stuff all the time…’
‘Oh, I don’t think so, Corinne.’
‘He does. You should make him buy me a new one…’
‘Quiet, Corinne! Sam – what are you doing—?’
Mum in the hall – Sam holding her by the arm – money in his other hand, twisting, twisting, and Mum with her mouth open, soundless.
‘You idiot,’ I say to the wall poster. ‘I hate you.’ And then, suddenly, I’m afraid. I’m afraid he knows. Even though he’s dead – that he knows.
‘I didn’t mean it,’ I whisper into the still air. ‘I didn’t mean to kill you.’
Nothing changes. The silence remains the same. No avenging ghost comes to slap me down, just an image of Sam’s face when he was really young. Fresh and smiling, holding up a present he’d bought for me on a holiday we had one time. I blink it out of my mind; I don’t want to think about it.
I get up and go out, careful to leave the door the exact way I found it. Down below, Mum calls my name and I jump like she caught me doing something I shouldn’t, but it’s only for dinner.
‘Did you want to go somewhere tomorrow?’ Dad asks as I sit down.
‘Why?’ I say. ‘It’s a school day.’
‘We could take a day off,’ Dad says, but I know where he wants us to go and I don’t fancy a day out in the Boneyard thank you. I’ve never been and I’m not going now. I shake my head.
‘I’d rather go to school,’ I say. ‘I don’t want to go there.’
Dad says nothing, just stares at me. He drags a hand through his hair and looks at Mum. We’ve forgotten how to be a family and this is like some book they’ve got hold of, and we’re on Chapter Five, ‘A functional family talks’. But it’s just too late.
‘If I’m having a day off,’ I say, ‘why can’t I do what I want?’
Dad looks confused. ‘I thought—’ he says again, and then he stops, head pressed low on his chest as if he’s looking at a gravy stain or something.
Mum goes out. I hear her open the door to the shop, go in and start moving stuff around. Dad stands by the back door making a sort of humming noise in the back of his throat.
‘It’s not easy you know,’ he says to me, ‘and you don’t exactly help.’
Suddenly I’m on my feet, black energy coursing through me.
‘Why should I help?’ I shout, shaking now, ‘When did anyone help me? I wanted you to, loads of times, but you just didn’t, did you?’
I turn to the door and Mum comes out of the shop all flushed in the face. I push past her and run upstairs two at a time. As I pass my brother’s room the draught pushes the door a little and it creaks sharply.
‘Go to hell,’ I shout at it, and then I’m in my own room, on the bed, clutching the sheet in my fists and screaming into it so no one hears. I’m mad as hell, but all I can see is Mum’s face, startled and confused. Maybe we weren’t going to the grave; maybe it really was just a day out, but it’s still too late; way too late. Wherever it is, they can go without me.
A long time passes. I put my fingers in my ears and try to sleep. It’s been a long time since I did that – tried to go to sleep with my fingers in my ears so I wouldn’t hear the yelling or the horrible sound of Sam gurgling in his throat: gurgling and bubbling like he did that last night in his horrible place. Tonight it’s only water burbling in the pipes, but it’s too close. Suppose I’ve raised his ghost and any moment I’m going to hear his feet on the stairs, stumbling up to see me one more time?