The Half Sister Page 20

  ‘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.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  It is very late when he wakes; he can see from the daylight and the drizzle that time has moved on without him. The bedsheet stinks of sick. The radio is on in her bedroom down the landing; it comes on automatically every morning, though, so it doesn’t mean she’s in there. She’s not, she’s up there. She’s not dead, she’s pacing. With both anxiety and relief he reminds himself that today is the day that she’ll say sorry and it will all be over.

  The radio unnerves him. Feeling dry-mouthed and nauseous, he creeps along the landing, but once he has turned it off, the quiet is as creepy as the voices, like being in a classroom when everyone else has gone home, where you can do anything you like and nothing. You can stand on the chairs and pull your trousers down. You can look in the teacher’s desk. In her bedside table, he finds a little gold watch which hangs lose around his wrist, some pills same as his mum has, other boring stuff, a torn-out page from an old-fashioned book. Cross-legged on the bed, he tries to decipher the words; it’s more an Edmund sort of thing than a Diana because it’s all about rivers to start with.

  For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song.

  The language and the layout make sense, it’s from the Bible and Solomon taught him about verses with numbers like this. Solomon is good at explaining things. When they took him away, they took all the explanations away with him. It is a terrible evil thing to have torn a page out of a Bible and it confirms his opinion that she is a devil woman in disguise, just like Edmund’s CD.

  Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.

  Tongue, roof, mouth: the individual words do not make much sense, but the meaning causes Mikey to lick the strange cave which opens up behind his lips, the smooth moulded dips and mounds, the secret sliding down inside himself at the very back. Cleave. He understands cleave as leave and knows one day his voice will break free. The Bible is important, Solomon would say she should have it. He decides to slide the page under the door to the nursery with his message written on the bottom (he hopes that this is not a sin, but he doesn’t think so, it’s not as if it’s graffiti).

  ‘If you say sorry for everything you have done I will let you out. Signed Michael. Wynhope House, Wynhope, Twycombe, England, Europe, The World, The Universe.’

  He slides the page under the nursery door. Not long after, the screaming starts all over again, but later she quietens down, so maybe God’s working his magic. He just needs to be patient.

  It’s past lunchtime, but he hasn’t had breakfast, so he pours himself a gigantic bowl of cereal. He doesn’t really feel like eating, so he drinks Coke instead because that’s good for hangovers. So are cigarettes, but he doesn’t smoke. He always thought smoking would kill his mum, but he’s wrong; she gave up smoking, she hardly drank at all, she left Paul, she tried very hard to stay alive for him. Grace used to say it was his job to wipe down the table, so that’s what he does, then he checks the nursery. No note back to him under the door, what if she doesn’t say sorry? She’ll have to. Everybody has to in the end, and the longer you leave it the harder it becomes, that’s what his mum says.

  Outside, he hangs around with the bronze boy, Hercules. They always talk about stuff like bikes and Lockdown. It’s better out here in the hot sun with so much space. He knows she can see him but he’s not going to even look up at her window, he’s just going to look like he’s happy and nothing’s worrying him at all, so he throws sticks for Monty and stones for no one and kneels down to reach into the pond to play with the fish, and then he spots a piece of paper blowing across the drive. He runs, it swerves, he stamps on it. She’s written a note with his red felt-tip pen on his pad of paper and dropped it out of the window. It was torn in half, but she’s taped it up again.

  He knew she’d want to get out and it would all be over by teatime.

  The note is difficult to read, all the writing is a joined-up mess and not sticking to the lines.

  Dear Mickey,

&n
bsp; She started off writing Michael, but then thought better of it and crossed out the C and turned the H into a K so she has ended up with a spelling mistake.

  I found your note. It was very naughty to write on a page from the Bible and you shouldn’t be prying into my drawers. If you let me out, then I can say sorry properly to you and you can say sorry to me and we can start all over again.

  Nothing will be solved if I’m locked in here. NOTHING. You must unlock the door otherwise you will be in trouble.

  I missed my appointment at the doctor’s yesterday. I must go. I’m not very well, that’s why I’ve been like I have been. I promise I won’t be cross.

  The handful of gravel hits the house and shatters back onto the flowerbed. He picks up more stones, hurls them at the front door. She hasn’t said sorry at all. She wants him to say sorry? What’s she got hidden in her bedroom that she’s so worried about? And does she expect him to believe her promises? She’s a liar, and once she promised to leave the passage door open and she didn’t. She should have just done what she was told then it would all be over. Is she that stupid? It’s time she learned to listen to him. Doesn’t she understand anything he tells her? You are a thick, common little slut, you must never forget that, he rages. You’re a nobody. When will you ever learn to apologise? And you can tell who you like, nobody will ever believe you. Who’s ever going to believe someone like you?

  The shaking turns to shivering then to exhaustion. All he wants now is to be somebody else and for it all to be over. On her phone there’s a text message from the surgery saying she’s missed her appointment, please call to make another one. So the doctor isn’t coming up the drive to find her, and Mikey’s face is twisting in the way it does when it wants to cry and he’s trying to control it. It seems important not to throw anything away, so he puts the note in a brand new A4 file which Edmund let him have and slides it into a secret compartment he makes, taped to the bottom of his circus animals box. He hates her for not doing what she was told, he hates her for the fact that he doesn’t know what to do with her, but most of all he hates her because of what she did and that’s what gives him the idea. All he asked her to do was say sorry, but he didn’t say what for. He could make another level with more challenges. No more secrets, no more lies.