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The Servants
M. M. Smith


A uniquely dark and elegant tale that illuminates the loneliness of childhood, the pain of loss and the power of imagination. It will charm and haunt its readers in equal measure.Eleven-year-old Mark is bored. He spends his days on the Brighton sea-front, practicing on his skate-board. His mother is too ill to leave the house, and his stepfather is determined that Mark shouldn’t disturb her. So when the old lady who lives in the flat downstairs introduces him to rock cakes and offers to show him a secret, he’s happy to indulge her.The old lady takes a large, old-fashioned key and leads Mark down a dusty corridor to a heavy door. Beyond the door is a world completely alien to Mark’s understanding. For behind the old lady’s tiny apartment, the house’s original servants’ quarters are still entirely intact, although derelict. Mark finds himself strangely drawn to this window onto the past, and when, the next time he visits, the old lady falls asleep, he steals the key and goes to visit the servants’ quarters alone.And suddenly Mark’s life takes a bizarre turn, as the past seems to collide with the present, dreams invade reality and truths become apparent to this hitherto unperceiving boy.










THE SERVANTS









M. M. Smith





























For M.R.S.

And in memory of the W.P.




Table of Contents


Prologue (#ufa27f839-e1aa-5320-b029-1884651cfa37)

Part One (#ue6af9a11-6ffd-5e96-a52a-c1f95899b9e5)

Chapter 1 (#u0cce24fc-7393-5af0-98fc-aca8dc3529a5)

Chapter 2 (#ub401f7e0-2334-5ca4-8db3-cfce21e08a1b)

Chapter 3 (#u817fdfbc-0356-5824-a7ff-9ab417724933)

Chapter 4 (#u004c219e-eecc-55f4-a214-c63a74968098)

Chapter 5 (#uc9747a74-4db0-5f52-9872-9ff70f89b026)

Chapter 6 (#u900edcbe-6621-50f7-9256-7f7b5955e43f)

Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)

Part Two (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)

Part Three (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




Prologue (#uc3b41b36-a3c4-5772-80bd-0ac0561eceba)


If you live long enough, everything happens.

As she walked up the last stretch of pavement towards the house, the old lady felt cold. Not so much on the surface – her thick coat, scarf and hat were holding their own against the chill, aided by the exertion of a battle along the wintry seafront – but inside. The older you get, the colder your bones become, as if turning slowly back to stone – readying themselves for the unexpected day or inevitable night when you'll try to move your limbs and discover they are now forever still, that there's nothing to do but wait for someone to gently close your eyes. The body accepts ageing with resignation, never having expected to last forever. The mind has different ideas, and no respect for time.

Sadly, the body almost always wins.

She paused at the top of the stairs down to her flat, and looked back towards the sea, remembering years when she had run down the pebbled shore to dive into the waves. She had not always been old, of course. Nor always a lady, either, if the truth be told. Age is an excellent camouflage, turning those who wear it into spies, sleepers deep in enemy territory. No one imagines that the person wrapped inside that pale, dry tissue paper might have sweated and yelled and run, in their day, that they might know secrets yet to be discovered in younger lives. Least of all the young themselves, who – for all their gangly verve and the raptor-like acquisitiveness of their gaze – seem to find it impossible to see much beyond the tips of their noses. Not all of them, of course, and not always. But mainly.

Eventually the old lady turned away from the sea, and started down the steps.

She let herself into her little basement home, a place where she had lived so long that it was hard sometimes to remember that it was physically separate from her. She never forgot how fortunate she was to have it, though, having seen her contemporaries (those still alive, at least) exchanging a lifetime of independence and accumulated possessions for some bare cell in an old persons' facility, surrounded by crabby strangers: stripped of everything but memories that in time came to seem more real than the world had ever been; condemned to tea that was never made quite how they liked it, enduring the consensus choice of which television channel to have on.

Yes, her flat was tiny. But it was hers.

She switched on the electric fire as soon as she was inside. She knew she was lucky, also, to feel as well as she did, that her aches and pains often faded if not exactly overnight, then during the course of a few days. Lucky, but not just lucky. You do not get to be old without learning some things, glimpsing a little of the way the world works – assuming you keep your eyes and ears open, at least, and she always had.

She understood that every life involves bargains, and exchange, and recently she had started to believe there were new things to be seen and heard.

Lately, in the last few weeks, she had found herself unsettled from time to time. Waking in the night as if disturbed by movement which had just that moment stopped. Aware of the weight of the house above her, like a dark cloud pregnant with rain. Convinced that, just below the threshold of audibility, someone had raised their voice.

Silly ideas, all of them. She hoped so, at least. Because it was hard to believe that any of them would promise good things.

The old lady removed her coat and hung it neatly on its hook on the back of the door. The key to living anywhere is to know how to live there – just ask any snail. She took from her coat pocket a brown paper bag, containing the snack she habitually took at this time in the late afternoon. Rhythm, order, ritual. The old and the very young understand the importance of these things. It's only in the intervening years that people think they can escape life's structures, not realizing how this apparent freedom traps them in a permanent here and now.

She took a plate from the little cupboard above her sink. She frowned a little, and hesitated before setting the plate down. It felt cold to the touch. The room wasn't warming as quickly as it usually did.

She stood at the counter for a moment and listened to the sound of feet on the pavement above her window as they moved past the house along the rails of their own lives. The footsteps seemed both distant and somewhat loud, against a silence in the house that seemed to grow fuller all the time.

Something was up. She was becoming increasingly convinced of it.

She put the kettle on, to make a cup of tea.

Half an hour later, comfortable in her chair and with enough cake inside her, she found herself dozing. She didn't mind. The room was nice and warm now. Resting her eyes for a few moments might be as good a way as any to prepare for what was coming next.

If you live long enough, everything happens.

And then some of it happens again.



PART ONE (#uc3b41b36-a3c4-5772-80bd-0ac0561eceba)




Chapter 1 (#uc3b41b36-a3c4-5772-80bd-0ac0561eceba)


MARK SAT ON a ridge of pebbles and watched as the colours over the sea started to turn. It had been a bright, clear afternoon, the sky hard and shiny and blue. A line of pink had now appeared along the horizon, and everything was slowly starting to get darker, and greyer, clouds detaching themselves one by one to come creeping over the rest of the sky. It was only a little after four o'clock, but the day was already drawing to a close. It was ending, and the night would start soon.

Normally Mark found you couldn't sit on the rocks for too long before your behind started to hurt. Today that didn't seem to be bothering him, possibly because the rest of him hurt too. Some bits hurt a little, others hurt a lot. They all hurt in slightly different ways. Skateboarding, he had discovered after extensive trials, was not as easy as it looked.

He'd owned his board for over a year – it was one of the last things his father had given him – but Mark hadn't had the chance to start learning how to use it while they were back in London. There had been too much confusion, too many new things to deal with. It hadn't seemed very important, what with everything else. When they'd driven down to the coast in David's car, however – Mark, his mother, and David, naturally – he'd sat all the way with the skateboard on his lap. A form of silent protest which he was not sure they'd understood, or even noticed. In the three weeks since, Mark had finally confronted the process of trying to teach a piece of wood (with wheels attached) which of them was the boss.

So far, the piece of wood was winning.

Mark had been to Brighton before, on long weekends with his mother and proper dad. He knew the seafront fairly well. There was a promenade along the beach, about forty feet lower than the level of the road. This had long stretches where you could walk and ride bikes and roller-blade – almost as if to make up for the fact that there was no sand on the beach, only pebbles, and so you couldn't do much there except sit and look out at the waves and the piers, adjusting your position once in a while to stop it from being too uncomfortable. There were cafés and bars dotted along it – together with a big paddling pool and a play area. Mark was eleven, and thus too old now for these last two entertainment centres. He had still been taken aback to discover that the pool had been drained for the winter, however, the cheerful summer chaos of the playground replaced by a few cold-looking mothers nursing coffees as toddlers dressed like tiny, earth-toned Michelin Men trundled vaguely up and down. Walking past the play area felt like passing a department store in the evening, when the doors were locked and most of the lights were off – just a single person deep inside, doing something at the till, or adjusting a pile of books, like a tidy ghost.

So Mark had spent most afternoons, and some of the mornings, on a stretch of the promenade where there was nothing but a wide, flat area of asphalt. Once this area held the original paddling pool, he'd been told, built when the seafront was very fashionable: but it had been old and not safe – or just not brightly coloured enough, Mark's mother had suggested – and so had been filled in and replaced. There were usually other boys a few years older than Mark hanging around this area, and some had laid out temporary ramps. They scooted up and down on their boards, making little jumps, and when they made it back down safely they peeled off in wide, sweeping arcs, loops of triumph that were actually more fun than the hard business of the tricks themselves – though Mark understood you couldn't have one without the other. These boys crash-landed often too: but not as often as Mark, and not as painfully, and Mark fell when he was only trying to stay on the thing, not do anything clever.

A lot of the boys seemed to know each other, and called out while they were watching their friends: encouragement, occasionally, but more often they laughed and shouted rude words and tried to put the others off. Mark understood that was how it was with friends when you were a boy, but he didn't have anyone to call out to. He didn't know anyone here at all. He skated in silence, and fell off that way too.

When the sky was more dark than light he stood up, the pebbles making a loud scrunching sound beneath his feet and hands. It was time to go home – or back to the house, anyway: the place they now seemed to be living in. A house that belonged to David, and which did not feel anything like home.

From where he stood, Mark could see the long run of houses on the other side of the Hove Lawns and the busy seafront road. These buildings all looked the same, and stretched for about six hundred yards. They were four storeys high, built nearly two hundred years ago, designed to look very similar to each other and painted all the same colour – pale yellowish, the colour of fresh pasta. Apparently this was called ‘Brunswick Cream’ and they all had to be painted that way because they were old and it was the law. The house Mark was staying in was halfway up the right-hand side of Brunswick Square, bang in the middle of the run of buildings. In the centre of the square was a big patch of grass surrounded by a tall ornamental hedge, the whole sloping up from the road so that the houses around all three sides had a good view of the sea. Mark had almost never seen anyone in the park area in the middle. It was almost as if that wasn't what it was for.

As you looked along the front to the right, the buildings changed. They became smaller, more varied, and after a while there were some that looked completely different and not old at all. A few tall buildings made of concrete, two big old hotels (one red, one white), then eventually the cinema, which looked as if it had been built in the dark by someone who didn't like buildings very much. Or so David said, and as a result Mark found he rather liked its featureless, rectangular bulk. You could see films in there, of course, though Mark hadn't. He was only allowed to go along the front in the area bounded by the yellow buildings. He was only permitted down here by himself at all because he'd flat-out refused to stay in the house the whole day, and after enduring a long lecture about talking to strangers. Mark had just stared at David during this, hoping the man would get the point – that he was a stranger too, so far as Mark was concerned. He hadn't.

It was getting cold now, but still Mark didn't start the walk up to the promenade. He stayed a little longer on the border between the sea and the land, wishing he wasn't there at all. He'd liked Brighton in the past. When he'd come with his mother and dad they'd stayed at a modern hotel down past the cinema. His mother spent hours poking around the Lanes, the really old area where the streets were narrow and twisted and most of the stores sold jewellery. They had spent long afternoons on the pier – the big, newer one, with all the rides, not the ruined West Pier, which was closer to Brunswick Square and which someone had, a few years before, set on fire. More than once. But now they were staying in David's house, and all Mark could see was the way the town came down to the sea, and then stopped.

London didn't stop. London went on more or less forever. That was a good thing for towns to do. It was a good thing for everything to do, except visits to museums, or toothache, or colds. Why should things go on for a little while and then stop? How could stopping be a good thing? Brighton ran out. It was interesting and fun for a while and then you hit the beach and it was pebbles and then it stopped and became the sea. The sea was different. The sea wasn't about you and what you wanted. The sea wasn't concerned with anything except itself, and it didn't care about anyone.

Mark watched as the starlings began to fly along the front, heading for the West Pier, and then finally started for home.




Chapter 2 (#uc3b41b36-a3c4-5772-80bd-0ac0561eceba)


BY THE TIME Mark had walked over the pedestrian crossing and up the pavement around the square, it was quite dark. It looked nice that way, he had to admit, lights coming on in the other houses.

When he got to David's house he noticed another light there, too.

The building they were living in was tall like the others, three big storeys above street level with a further lower one at the very top. To the right of the wide steps which led up to the front door there was a little curving staircase that headed downwards. It was made of metal which had been painted black more than once but was now leaking rust. Losing a long battle against the salty air, like everything else on the seafront. At the bottom of this staircase was a tiny basement courtyard, about four feet deep by eight feet wide, and under the steps to the main house was another door. There was a window in the front of this section, a smaller version of the big bow-fronted windows above. It was covered with lace curtains, which meant you couldn't see inside. Apparently someone else lived there, an old woman. David, who liked to explain everything – like the fact his accent sounded weird at times because he'd spent a long time living in America – had explained that although he owned the whole house, the basement was a self-contained flat which he hadn't even been inside. The woman who lived there had been there for years and years and years, and so he'd agreed to let her stay. Mark had never seen any actual evidence that anyone lived there, and had half-wondered if the whole story had been a lie to keep him out of that part of the house.

But tonight there was a glow behind the curtains, dim and yellow, as if from a single lamp with a weak bulb.

He let himself into the main house with his keys. The hallway felt cold and bare. David had had the whole place painted white inside before they moved down from London. He had never lived here himself, having bought it only six months ago using all the money he'd made while he was away doing whatever boring thing he'd been doing in America.

Mark shut the door very quietly behind him; but not quietly enough.

‘Mark? Is that you?’

His stepfather's voice sounded flat and hard as it echoed down the wide staircase from the floor above. Mark put his skateboard in the room that was serving as his bedroom, on the right-hand side of the corridor, and slowly started up the stairs.

‘Yeah,’ he said.

Who else was it going to be?

His mother's bedroom was on the second floor, the highest level currently in use. The top two floors were closed up and used for storage, the rooms uncarpeted and bare, with heating that didn't work. Mark got the idea that David didn't have enough money left to do anything about them right now.

His mother was in the front room when he walked in. ‘Hello, honey,’ she said. ‘How was your day?’

She was on the couch which had been put in the middle of the front room on this floor, the one with the wide bay window looking over the square. There was a thick blanket over her. The television in the corner was on, but the sound was turned off.

Originally the idea had been that this would be Mark's room, but soon after they'd got down here it had become obvious his mother wasn't finding the stairs easy. She needed somewhere to spend time on this level, because it drove her nuts to be stuck in the bedroom all day, and so Mark had wound up in the room underneath, which was supposed to be a sitting room. He didn't mind, because his mother needed it to be this way, but it still felt as if he was camping out.

Mark kissed her on the cheek, trying to remember how many days it had been since she had left the house. This room looked nice, at least. There were four or five lamps, all casting a glow, and the only pictures in the house were on its walls.

She smiled up at him. ‘Any luck?’

‘A little,’ he said, but – having been trained by her to be honest, he upturned his palms to reveal the grazes. ‘Not a lot.’

She winced. Mark noticed that the lines around her eyes, which hadn't even been there six months ago, looked a little deeper, and that there were a couple more grey hairs amongst the deep, rich brown.

‘It's okay,’ he said. ‘I'll get there.’

‘Sure you will,’ said a voice.

David came out of his mother's bedroom, looking the way he always did. He was slim and a little over medium height and he wore a pair of neatly-pressed chinos and a denim shirt, as usual. His nose was straight. His hair was floppy but somehow neat. He looked – according to a friend Mark had back in London, whose uncle worked in the stock exchange and so had experience of these matters – like someone for whom every day was Dress Down Friday. He did not look at all like Mark's real father, who had short hair and was strongly built and wore jeans and T-shirts all the time and in general looked like someone you didn't want to get in a fight with.

David was drying his hands on a small towel. Mark found this annoying.

‘Let's see,’ he said, cocking his head at Mark.

‘Just a graze,’ Mark muttered, not showing him. ‘What are we eating? Can we order from Wo Fat?’

The question had been directed solely at his mother, but David squatted down to talk to him. This made him a good deal shorter than Mark, which seemed an odd thing to do. Mark wasn't a little child.

‘Your mother's not feeling too hungry,’ David said, with the voice he used for saying things like that, and just about everything else. ‘I went to the supermarket earlier. There's cool stuff in the fridge. Maybe you could forage yourself something from there?’

‘But…’ Mark said. What he wanted to say was that he'd done that the previous evening, and the night before, not to mention both lunchtimes. Also that frequently ordering food in from Wo Fat, a Chinese restaurant up on Western Road, was traditional when they stayed down in Brighton – though this was a ritual which involved Mark's real father, not David.

Mark caught sight of his mother, however, and didn't say either of these things. She smiled at him again, and shrugged.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow, maybe, okay?’

Mark nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He was furious at David for putting his mother in this position, for making her be the one who apologized when Mark knew it was David who didn't really approve of takeaways, and who felt she should only be eating very healthy things. Who just didn't … get it.

Didn't get anything. Shouldn't be here.

‘Right – maybe tomorrow,’ David said, unconvincingly.

‘Who knows – perhaps we'll even go out to eat.’

Mark sat on the couch and talked with his mother for a while, and then they watched some television together. She moved the blanket so it lay over the two of them, and it was nice, even though David was hovering in the background doing whatever it was he always did.

‘You must be getting hungry, aren't you?’ his stepfather said, after half an hour.

Mark turned to stare at him. His mother was looking tired, and Mark knew what was being implied. But it wasn't David's place to say it, and Mark wanted him to realize that. David just looked back with eyes that were equally unblinking.

Mark muttered goodnight and took himself downstairs, where he made a ham sandwich in the kitchen, added a couple of biscuits, and took the plate into ‘his’ room with the last available Diet Coke.

There was no carpet on the floor of his room and nothing on the walls, and it was not terribly warm. The sash window did not fit snugly and rattled a little sometimes in the night.

He sat with a blanket around his shoulders and watched his little television for a couple of hours, but soon he felt tired from another long afternoon of falling off his skateboard, and went to bed.

When he dreamed, it was of being back in the house in London. Though that house had been a lot smaller than the one in Brighton, it had been a real home. The place where he'd been born, grown up, had friends to visit, waited for Santa Claus to come every year – even after his father had explained that there was no such thing.

Mark dreamed he was in the back garden there, kicking a ball around with his dad. They ran around together, knocking it back and forth, faster and faster. Mark was better at it than he'd ever been before, always managing to return his dad's searching passes, earning grins and laughs and shouts of approval for each time he sent it singing back. They both started panting, getting out of breath but keeping at it, knowing there was some kind of force acting through them now, something outside their control, that they had to keep playing while it lasted, no matter how tired they got.

Then Mark's father kicked the ball in a completely different direction.

They hadn't been making it easy for each other before, but at least he'd been kicking it somewhere Mark had a chance of getting to. This last kick wasn't a pass he was ever going to be able to intercept. The ball went sailing clean over the fence on a trajectory that was low and flat and weirdly slow. It flew silently, disappearing into a twilight that arrived suddenly and yet then felt as if it had been there forever. Mark turned his head to watch it go, wondering if he was ever going to be able to get the ball back. He watched also because it meant he did not have to look back at his father's face, in case he saw there that this kick had not been an accident, that his dad had deliberately kicked it over the fence.

Mark kept waiting for the sound of a crash, of the ball hitting a window – or a least the ground – but it never came.

When he eventually did turn back he realized his father had gone, could never have really been there, in fact. Mark was no longer in the garden back at the old house, but on the promenade down by Brighton seafront, next to one of the super-benches that had old metalwork walls and a roof and places where you could sit on all sides. It was dark, and he was alone, and there was nothing to see or hear except the sound of the sea.

Then Mark realized he was lying down rather than standing, and that he was not nearly cold enough to be by the sea in the middle of the night: that the sound he'd interpreted as the sea was in fact the rumble of distant traffic on the road, heard through a window. He came to understand that in reality he was in his bed in David's house. The room was very dark but for a thin strip of pale light that seeped through a gap in the curtains from a streetlight outside in the square. Though it wasn't as cold as the beach would have been, it was still far from warm, and he huddled deep into his bedclothes, lying on his side, facing out into the room.

As he started to drift towards sleep again he thought he could hear a different noise. A first it sounded like a soft and distant flapping, but then he realized it was people talking somewhere. At least two voices, maybe more. He wondered if it was his mother and David, upstairs, though it must be very late by now, past the middle of the night. His mother needed a lot of sleep at the moment. If she was awake at this time, it was not a good thing.

He opened his eyes a little.

And saw something pass in front of his face.

It was there for barely a second, something that looked like the back of someone's hand, moving past the side of the bed within a couple of feet of his head. A sound that was like the swish of fabric.

Then he heard footsteps, and though they must have been from upstairs they did not sound like it. They sounded more as if they had travelled across the floor of his room, from just beside his bed to the doorway, and then disappeared into the corridor and away toward the back of the house.

Then everything was silent, and still.




Chapter 3 (#uc3b41b36-a3c4-5772-80bd-0ac0561eceba)


THE NEXT MORNING, Mark left the house early, skate board under his arm as usual and a bolted breakfast of cornflakes taken alone in the silent kitchen. He was still feeling fuzzy from the dreams he'd had in the night, and wanted to get out into the cold winter sun. The house felt dark sometimes, even when all the lights were on.

He shouted upstairs to say he was going out. David appeared quickly at the top of the stairs, finger to his lips. His mother was asleep, evidently, and her keeper wanted Mark to keep quiet.

He shrugged angrily – he was supposed to tell them where he was going, wasn't he? David was forever saying so – but shut the big front door behind him quietly on the way out. The sky was wide and sharp blue again, though something about the quality of the light suggested there might be rain later. You could see that kind of thing more easily here than in a city. Better get his practice done early, then, rather than spend the morning walking up and down. He was getting a little bored with the seafront walk, if he was honest. When they used to come here they would go to the Lanes and look at the shops for at least some of the time. Even though few of them held things of any interest to him he wanted to do that now. He was tired of this stretch of the promenade. He was tired of spending so much time alone.

He was just setting off down the slope towards the road when something caught his eye. He turned and saw that the door to the basement apartment was open. He went to the top of the metal staircase and peered down, curious.

He couldn't see much beyond the door, which was open about a foot and revealed a short, narrow passageway beyond. Then he heard a noise from within. It sounded like someone struggling with something.

‘Hello?’ he said.

There was no answer.

He went down the steps until he was in the basement courtyard. His head was only a couple of feet below the level of the pavement here, but it felt strange, as if he was descending into a whole other part of Brighton. He stood at the door and heard the noise again.

‘Hello?’ he repeated.

Still no response, and he was about to go back up the staircase when he heard the sound of shuffling feet. He took a hurried step back from the door, suddenly feeling like an intruder.

A woman appeared out of the gloom.

She was old, and short – about the same height as Mark – and a little stooped. Her hair was pure white and her face was white too and looked as though it was made of paper that had been scrunched up in someone's hand and then flattened out again. She was dressed all in black, not the black of new things but the colour of a dress that had once been black but had been washed and folded and worn again, many times. The sleeves were fringed with lace. Her wrists were like sticks poking out of them, and the hands at the end were covered in liver spots, brown and purple against ivory skin. In one of these she was holding a light bulb.

‘Who are you?’

‘Mark,’ he said, hurriedly. ‘I … I live upstairs.’

The old lady nodded once, and kept looking at him. He realized she was not so much old as very old, and also a little scary-looking. When she blinked she looked like a bird, the kind you saw on the seafront, stealing bits of other people's toast.

‘I was walking past and I heard a sound, so … I wondered if someone needed help.’

‘You must have good ears,’ she said. Her voice was dry, and a little cracked. ‘Do you have good ears? Do you hear things?’

‘Well, yes, I suppose so,’ Mark said.

The old lady held up the light bulb. ‘Trying to change this. Can't get the chair to stay steady. That's all.’

‘I could help, if you wanted?’

She smiled, and for a moment looked less intimidating and also younger. Certainly not a day over eighty-five.

She turned and walked through the door, and Mark followed.

The corridor was very narrow indeed, but after only a couple of feet there was another doorway. Mark realized that the first passageway was an addition, part of the courtyard which had been enclosed to provide somewhere to hang coats and store umbrellas. Beyond the inner doorway was a second corridor, which was much wider and evidently lay directly underneath the hallway of the house upstairs.

On the right side of this short corridor was a door, and Mark glanced through it as he stepped into the gloom. In a space about a third of the size of the room he was using upstairs, the old woman had crammed a single bed, two narrow armchairs, a small table, a bookcase, and a wardrobe. There was a tiny kitchen area under the bow-window. The furniture looked like the kind of stuff you saw outside second-hand shops, not protected from the weather and priced at about four pounds each. The air in the room was soft and dim, filtered through the lace curtains. The whole space couldn't have been more than about twelve feet by eight, and most adults would have felt themselves wanting to stoop.

He turned back to see that the old lady was standing by a rickety wooden chair in the passageway. A naked cable hung down from the ceiling. He took the bulb from the lady's hand and carefully climbed up onto the chair.

He could feel the legs wobbling but his practice on the promenade over the last couple of weeks made him feel slightly more confident of keeping the chair upright – certainly more than the woman's hand gripping the back of the chair did, which he felt was unlikely to make much difference if the thing did decide to tip over.

He stretched up and unscrewed the bulb already in the fitting. It resisted, but finally came out with a rusty-sounding squeak. He handed it down to the old lady and pushed the new one in – and was startled when it suddenly glowed in his hand.

‘Whoops,’ the old lady said. ‘Sorry’

He quickly screwed the bulb in before it got hot, then jumped down from the chair. He could see now that this corridor stopped after about six feet, where there was a heavy door which didn't look as if it had been opened in a long time. Mark was surprised. He'd assumed the old lady must have at least one more room in her flat, maybe two – she couldn't possibly live just in that front space, could she?

The hallway seemed gloomy even now it was lit. It was very dusty and there was an underlying smell, like the inside of something you were only supposed to know from the outside. There were no tiles on the floor, only battered floorboards, and the walls were dingy.

‘That's most kind,’ the old lady said.

Mark shrugged, suddenly feeling a little embarrassed.

When he got to the place on the promenade where the other kids normally were, Mark was confused at first. There was nobody there. As he stood in the middle of the open area, he eventually remembered it was a Monday morning. Everybody else was at school, probably – which is where Mark should have been, and would be, if they were still in London. The seafront was deserted and even the little café which had been open over the weekend was shut, the white plastic tables and chairs put away.

Mark didn't mind at first. At least he had the place to himself and wouldn't have to worry that other boys – or girls: he'd seen a couple down here – might be laughing at him. After he'd been going up and down for an hour or so, however, he came to think maybe it didn't work like that after all. Everything he did seemed a little more fluid than it had the day before. He still couldn't flip the board on either axis, and every attempt ended in a hectic scrabble and the clattering sound of the board crash-landing several feet away – but on the other hand he didn't wind up sliding along the ground as often, generally managing to land on his feet. So it was progress, kind of.

But it felt a little pointless.

The danger that other people might laugh at your mistakes was precisely what made it worthwhile – essential, even – to keep on trying. That was part of why boys were such a tough audience for each other: it made you do stuff. Without this you had to do everything for yourself, and that was okay for a while but then you started to wonder why you were doing it, and why you were still so crap at it. It made you question what the point of it all was, if it just meant you were going up and down, falling off, then going up and down again. Mark started looking up expectantly when people came past, in case someone was going to wander over to his area, put down a plank and a wedge, and start doing things. But nobody did. The only people walking up and down were old men with dogs, or couples not talking to each other.

Soon there was hardly anyone at all, as the sky got more leaden and a cold wind picked up from the sea. The skateboard just didn't want to stay upright, or carry him. All it wanted was to tip him over, as painfully as possible, and then hurtle randomly away.

In the end it started to rain and Mark walked bad-temperedly back to the house, past the little hut that sold sandwiches and tea and cakes regardless of what day of the week it was, and whatever the weather. You couldn't sit inside it, but there were plastic tables and chairs arranged on the promenade to one side, protected from the wind – slightly – by sheets of yellow canvas. The café was called The Meeting Place but today it was deserted except for a middle-aged man sitting alone at a table, looking down at his hands, an empty tea cup beside him. He didn't look as if he was expecting to meet anyone.

When he started to look up Mark hurried past, in case the man's face reminded him too much of his own.

When he got indoors David was in the kitchen, standing in front of the fridge staring at the contents as if he couldn't understand what he was seeing. Given that he had bought everything in there – very little of which was on Mark's Favourite Things To Eat list – Mark thought that was annoying of him.

‘How's it going?’ David asked, still gazing into the fridge.

Mark threw his jacket over a chair. ‘Pretty crap,’ he said.

David watched water drip off it onto the floor. ‘Going back out after lunch?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it's raining,’ Mark snapped. ‘And it's a waste of time. You might have to put up with me being in your house for a while. Sorry if that's going to put you out.’

‘Of course it won't,’ David said. For once his stepfather sounded irritated. ‘You can do whatever you want. It's your house too.’

‘No, it's not,’ Mark said, as if he'd been waiting for just this opportunity. ‘I don't live here. I live in London.’

‘Not any more,’ David said. ‘We—’

‘We don't do anything. What I do is nothing to do with you.’

‘Actually, it is,’ David sighed. ‘Your mother and I got married, Mark. Remember? You were there. That means what you do has everything to do with me. You may not like it, but that's the way it is. We're just going to have to work at it. It's like skateboarding. You can't just expect—’

‘Oh fuck off,’ Mark muttered.

David stared at him, still holding the door to the fridge, and the room suddenly felt very quiet.

‘I'm going to have to ask you to apologize for that,’ David said.

Mark had been as surprised as David to hear the words come out of his mouth, but he wasn't going to take them back.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Is everything all right down there?’

They both turned at the sound of Mark's mother's voice coming down the stairs. Mark opened his mouth to say no, of course it wasn't, how could it be, but David got there first. He walked quickly over to stand in the doorway, tilted his head up.

‘It's fine,’ he said. ‘I'll be right up, honey’

Mark understood then what his position had become. David now stood between him and his mother. He always would. This was his house. He ruled. Whatever he wanted to do, or say, he could. There was nothing Mark could do about that. Yet.

‘Yeah,’ he snarled, quietly, ‘everything's fine.’

He pushed past David and into the hallway, grabbing his jacket as he went past. He could hear it was still raining outside, but he didn't care. He didn't want to stay in the house.

David said something to him in passing but Mark didn't listen, instead yanking the front door open and running outside, this time not caring how much noise the door made as it slammed behind him. He started quickly down the steps, but they were wet, and he was moving too fast.

On the second one down he slipped, his foot sliding off and jarring down onto the third. He tried to keep himself upright but his other foot was soon slipping too, and the next thing he knew he was tumbling sideways to land flat on his face, sprawled across a puddle on the pavement.

The wind was knocked out of him, all at once, and with it went his anger. It was replaced with something smaller and more painful. Something like misery. He had fallen down like this several times every day for weeks, but that had been different. That was just a matter of not being able to keep his balance on the board.

This time it felt as if he'd been shoved.

‘Oh dear,’ said a voice.

Mark looked up to see an old woman was standing a few feet away on the pavement. The old woman, in fact: the one from the basement flat. She was bundled up in a black coat, woolly and thick, and was holding a little black umbrella.

She was looking down at him. ‘Horrible day,’ she said.

Then: ‘Are you hungry?’




Chapter 4 (#uc3b41b36-a3c4-5772-80bd-0ac0561eceba)


WHILE THEY WAITED for the old lady's kettle to boil – it didn't plug into the wall, but sat on the stove – she opened the narrow door at the far end of her room. Beyond it lay a minuscule bathroom. The lady came back holding a towel. It was pale yellow and ragged around the edges but very soft, and Mark used it to dry his hands and face.

Then he sat in one of the two chairs and looked around the room as the woman made two cups of tea. He felt odd being in here, but when he'd been lying there on the pavement at the old lady's feet with the rain coming down, he hadn't known what else to do. He couldn't go back inside the house because she'd seen him storming out, and also because he just didn't want to. He couldn't go down to the seafront – he'd get soaked.

There wasn't anywhere else to go. So he'd got to his feet and shrugged. The old woman held up a small brown paper bag.

‘I can never finish one all by myself,’ she said. ‘Why don't you come down and share it with me?’

As she poured water into the teapot, Mark realized he could still detect the odour he'd picked up in the passageway after helping the lady fix her light. It seemed hard to believe it was coming from in here, though. Everything was spotlessly tidy. The top of the little table, and the arms of the chair he sat in, were not home to a single speck of dust. The bed was so tightly made that the blanket was utterly flat. The old-fashioned chrome clock on the bedside table gleamed as if had been polished that morning. The tiny stove – which only had one ring, and a grill about a foot wide – was obviously prehistoric, but still looked as if it had been recently cleaned by a high pressure hose.

He couldn't help wondering if the smell came from the old lady herself, though that wasn't a nice thought and didn't seem likely. It was a slightly damp, brown smell, and everything about her was dry and white and grey.

There was only one picture on the walls, and it was very long and thin. It was an old painting, and showed a line of familiar buildings that all looked the same.

The old lady saw him looking at it. ‘A panorama of the seafront,’ she said. ‘Painted a hundred and seventy years ago.’

Apart from the fact that the few people in the picture wore strange suits and top hats, or long skirts that bulged out at the back, very little about the view had changed. Mark felt obscurely annoyed at Brighton for being that way. In London, things changed all the time. They went on forever, but they changed. Here things stopped, but stayed the same.

‘How long have you lived here?’

‘Oh, quite some time,’ she said. ‘But no, I don't remember it that way’

She put a cup of tea down next to him. It didn't look like any cup of tea he'd seen before. It was dark brown, almost red. ‘There.’

‘Is that … a special kind of tea?’

‘No,’ she said, lowering herself slowly into the other chair. ‘It's just strong. Most people make their tea far too weak, and what's the point in that? If you want a cup of tea, have a cup of tea. That's what I say’

Next to the tea she put down a plate on which lay the contents of the brown paper bag. This was a cake, but of a kind with which Mark was unfamiliar, though he thought he might have seen things like it for sale at The Meeting Place. The cake had been cut neatly in half. Mark picked up one part and bit into it cautiously. It was hard and tasted of flour and was studded with little raisins. It was not consistent with his idea of a good time.

‘Very nice,’ he said, putting it back down.

‘Keep at it,’ she said. ‘Not everything tastes good in the first bite.’

This sounded uncomfortably like the lecture David had been giving him upstairs, before he ran out, and Mark sat back in his chair.

‘Oh dear,’ the old lady said. ‘Did I say something wrong?’

They remained like that for a while. Mark picked up the cake again, and took another bite. It still tasted odd, as if it came from a time when people ate things because they had to eat, not because they expected to get much pleasure from it. The War, perhaps, when Mark gathered things in general had been somewhat substandard. He liked the tea strong, though, and the third and fourth bites of the cake – by which time he'd lowered his expectations – were not too bad. The raisins were okay, at least.

‘Why were you running?’ the old lady asked, out of the silence.

He shrugged. He didn't know what to say, and he didn't face questions like this very often. If another kid your own age asked then you'd just say the person who'd annoyed you was an arsehole and go kick a football and by the time that was over you wouldn't be so mad. Grown-ups never made that kind of enquiry, and it seemed unlikely the old lady would much fancy knocking a football around. ‘I just wanted to get out of there.’

‘Trouble upstairs?’

‘I suppose so.’

The old lady nodded. ‘I hear coughing, sometimes.’

‘My mother,’ Mark said, defensively. ‘She's not too well at the moment. She's okay, though.’

‘And your father?’

‘He's not my father.’

The old lady paused, her own portion of the rock cake – that's what it was called, apparently – halfway to her mouth. ‘Oh. I understood he was married to your mother.’

‘Well, yes, he is.’

She cocked her head slightly on one side. ‘So …’

‘That doesn't make him my dad. I have a dad already. He lives in London.’

‘I went to London once,’ she said. ‘Didn't like it much. Too many people. Couldn't tell who anyone was.’

‘It's better than here. Stuff happens. You can go to places.’

Mark had spoken far more sharply than he'd intended, but she didn't seem to notice.

‘I'm sure you're right,’ she said.

She went to the counter and poured a little more water into the teapot. She swirled the pot around, slowly, looking up through the window. The lace curtains prevented you from being able to see much, but you could tell it was still raining hard. ‘How long have they been married?’

‘Four months. They did it really quickly. I think he made her do it fast in case she realized what an idiot he is and changed her mind.’

‘Is he an idiot?’

‘Yes. He really is. He's really annoying, too. He's always trying to make me do things, and getting in the way. He doesn't know anything about us. He doesn't understand.’

The old lady just kept swirling the teapot around. The room was warm now, almost stuffy. The clock on the bedside table ticked loudly. Each tick seemed to come more slowly than the last tock, and Mark suddenly felt very homesick. He didn't want to be here, in this tiny flat, in this house, in this town. He wanted to be back in London, in his old room, watching television or playing a video game and knowing that his mother and real father were downstairs. Even if once in a while voices had been raised, it was home. It had been real. This was not. This was a place where you just marked time.

When was he going back to school? When was he going to see his friends again? When was he going to see his dad?

He needed to know the answer to these questions, but every time the clock ticked it seemed to get louder, as if each tock was a bar in the cage that held him here. He grabbed the remaining chunk of his portion of the cake and put it all in his mouth at once, chewing it quickly. It was dry and leached all of the moisture out of his mouth, but once he'd swallowed it, he could go. It didn't matter where. There were covered benches down on the promenade, like the one he'd dreamed about the night before. He could sit sheltered in one of those, watch it rain on the ocean. How pointless was that, by the way – raining on the ocean? Why did it even bother? He was feeling miserable now, and everything seemed stupid. He just wanted to go.

But when he glanced up, ready to start making his excuses, he saw the old lady was looking at him with a curious expression on her face – partly smiling, but also serious, as if making an assessment.

She cocked her head on one side. ‘How would you like to see something?’ she said.

‘Like what?’

‘Just … something you might find interesting.’

She went to a small drawer in the counter, took an object out and held it up to show him. It was a large key.

He frowned. ‘What's that for?’

‘I'll show you,’ she said. ‘It's all right – you can bring your tea.’

Mark followed the old lady out into the corridor. He assumed she was going to go left, into the narrow passageway that led to the outer door, that perhaps there was something stored in a cupboard there. He had a horrible suspicion she was going to give him something. Old people did that, sometimes, thinking they were being nice but in fact making you accept something that you didn't understand or value and didn't know what to do with.

Instead she turned right and walked to the big, solid door. She fitted the key into its lock and turned it with an apparent effort. It made a loud, hollow sound, like a single horse's hoof landing on the road. She turned the knob and pushed, and the door opened away from her, slowly receding, without any sound at all.

There was darkness on the other side, the faintest hint of a very pale, grey glow in one corner.

‘Ready?’ she said.

She reached into the gloom and flicked a switch on the wall, and suddenly a couple of dim lights came on beyond, hanging from the ceiling of whatever lay on the other side of the door.

Mark's mouth dropped open slowly.




Chapter 5 (#uc3b41b36-a3c4-5772-80bd-0ac0561eceba)


HE FOLLOWED THE old lady as she stepped through the threshold and into the corridor beyond. It was the same width as the one they'd entered from, and ran towards the back of the building. Where the first corridor had been merely grimy, however, the walls here were almost brown. Mark looked more closely and saw that the colour was mottled, as if caused by years and years of smoke, under a thick layer of dust.

There were two openings on the right of the corridor. The first was a narrow door, which was shut. The second, a couple of yards further on, was the entrance to a short side corridor. There was a door on the left of this, and another opening at the end.

Past this, the main corridor ran for a few more yards and then took a sharp right turn. He couldn't see what happened after that, but it was from down there that the soft grey light was coming.

‘What is this?’

‘What do you think?’

Mark shook his head. He couldn't imagine what this space might have been. It looked a little like a floor of the house above, but with much lower ceilings and no windows and no fancy bits anywhere. It felt ancient, almost like a cave – but because of the smooth surfaces and corners everywhere, it also felt almost modern.

‘The servants' quarters,’ the old lady said.

‘Servants?’

‘These houses were built a long time ago. Not even the last century – the one before that. They were made specially for fancy people up in London, who wanted to come and take the sea air.’

‘On holiday?’

‘Like a holiday, but it was supposed to be good for their health too. Fancy people weren't used to doing anything for themselves in those days, though, and so they brought their servants along with them.’

‘What kind of servants?’

The lady opened the first door. Beyond was a dark recess, about four feet deep and three feet wide, with shelves on either side. These were empty and thick with dust and cobwebs.

‘The butler's pantry,’ she said. ‘You've heard of butlers, I assume?’

Mark's understanding of the term was largely confined to the expression ‘the butler did it’, plus he'd heard of Jeeves, but he nodded. ‘The man who opened the door to people.’

She smiled faintly. ‘That, and a good deal more. He was in charge of the world down here, for the most part, and one of his responsibilities was the house's wine, and brandy, and port.’ She closed the door again and pointed at a dark smudge just below the door handle, which extended a couple of inches either side of where the door met the frame. ‘This was sealed with wax every night, to make sure none of the other servants … helped themselves.’

She led Mark down the corridor and into the right turn. The first door on the left was open. Beyond was a tiny, windowless room, barely big enough to hold a single bed. Now it was full of old broken furniture and shadows. ‘This was where the butler slept.’

‘It's tiny.’

‘Not for a servant, I can assure you. Only one other person down here even had a room to themselves.’

She walked on past the doorway to the end. The lights from the corridor didn't shed much illumination here, and all Mark could make out was a murky and low-ceilinged space, again filled with bits of old junk.

‘The servants' parlour. They ate their meals in here, and the housemaid would sleep on the floor at night.’

‘This is where they hung out?’

‘There was no “hanging out”. They worked. I'll show you where.’

As she led Mark back to the main corridor, the old lady trailed her frail hand along the smooth surface of the right-hand wall. Where it joined the other passage, it turned in a smooth arc.

When they reached the point at the bottom where the corridor turned to the right again, Mark gasped quietly. He could see now where the light had been coming from.

The space they walked into was almost like a small, enclosed courtyard, filled with muted grey light, as if from inside a rain cloud. It was protected from the sky by a wooden roof and a large skylight, but still felt nearly as much a part of the outside as a part of the house. This, he realized, was where the smell was coming from. A couple of panes of glass in the skylight were cracked or broken, and water was dripping steadily onto the floor, onto broken tiles and pieces of wood which lay strewn all around. They smelt rotten. There were pigeon feathers on the ground, too, and quite a lot of bird crap. There was a soft cooing sound from somewhere.

‘Dreadful things,’ the old lady said. ‘Rats with wings.’

Mark barely heard her. He was turning in a slow circle. On the left of the room there were a couple more doorways, one to an area with metal grilles in the walls. At the far end of the space was another pair, but much lower, and on the right side of the room, which he assumed must be a kitchen, he saw the rusted remains of … he wasn't really sure what it was, in fact.

‘The range,’ the old lady said. ‘Where meals for the entire household were cooked. There would have been a big table here, right where we're standing, but I'm sure that was sold many years ago. Probably a dining table up in London now, or someone's desk. People stopped living this way seventy or eighty years ago. In most houses all this has been turned into a basement flat.’

Now Mark thought about it, he realized he knew this. His mother had a friend in London who lived in Notting Hill, in an apartment that was below ground level, like this. Hers was all white walls and down-lighting and big paintings with splashes of colour, however. It was hard to imagine it could ever have been something like this.

He pointed at the small room with grilles in the walls. ‘What was that?’

‘It's where the meat was stored.’

‘They had a room, just for the fridge?’

‘There were no refrigerators. The meat was hung. The grilles in the walls are so the air could circulate.’

‘Didn't the meat go off?’

‘Sometimes. The space next to it is the oven and bakery area. Then …’ She turned to indicate the two low doors at the end. ‘Storage areas. Vegetables and fruit on the left, dairy – milk, cheese – on the right.’

Mark went over and entered each area in turn, having to crouch slightly to get inside. The ceilings were curved, like a vault. There were shelves on either side of both rooms, again holding nothing but years and years of dust. They could have stored a lot once, though.

When he came back out he noticed a couple of broken wooden boxes on the other side of the kitchen space. They had wire netting across the front, and looked like very basic rabbit hutches that had fallen apart.

‘Chickens,’ the old lady said.

‘Chickens? They had chickens in the house?’

‘Of course. Fresh eggs every morning.’

Mark laughed, trying to picture a state of affairs in which it made sense to have live chickens in a place where people lived. Beyond the coops was a shallow recess in the wall, about eight feet wide and four feet deep. ‘Was that a fireplace?’

The old lady smiled. ‘No, dear. That was where the cook slept. And the scullery maid, too, unless she just bedded down in the middle of the floor.’

‘It's cold, though,’ he said, trying to picture this.

‘Of course. It's almost underground. But it would have been different when the range was alight. Then it would have been the one warm place down here. The cook was lucky, in winter. In summer … not so lucky’

Mark tried to imagine what it had been like. Two people sleeping in this area – in the kitchen, another in the other tiny room he'd seen at the end of the side corridor. Meat hanging in the space over there, a range puffing out smoke and heat, chickens clucking and walking around, the cook clattering around at the stove…

He wandered back over to the bakery area – and was startled when a bird suddenly appeared from nowhere, flapping within inches of his face. It scrabbled chaotically out into the main area, careering through the air, circling round and bashing into the glass of the skylight. Though she was standing directly underneath, the old lady paid it no attention at all. Eventually it found the broken pane and burst outside, shooting upwards into the gloom and rain.

‘Who was the other servant?’ Mark asked. ‘You said there was another one who had his own room.’

‘Not his, her,’ the old lady said. ‘Perhaps the most important one of all.’

‘I thought the butler…’

‘The butler was the public face of below-stairs. He was the one visitors saw, if they saw anyone at all.’

‘Why wouldn't they see anyone else?’

‘Servants were supposed to keep out of sight. As if everything happened by magic. They even had their own staircase, at the back of the house, weren't allowed to use the main one. In a house like this all the rooms upstairs would have counters on the landings outside, so that trays of tea or food could be left or collected without the family having to deal with a housemaid directly. Fires would be built and lit in all the rooms before the family got up – and the ash cleared away after they went to bed. The newspaper left ready on the table every morning. Shoes cleaned and left outside bedroom doors, ready for the next day. Silent and invisible. Like living with a team of elves.’

‘So who…’

‘The housekeeper,’ the old lady said, as she led Mark out of the kitchen and back into the main corridor. ‘She gave the housemaids their jobs. She talked with the mistress, discussing what meals would be required that week, and did all the ordering of the food. She organized the linen, made sure all the tasks got done. She was … the queen bee. Down here, anyway’

‘Where did she sleep?’

‘She had the best room of all.’

The old lady walked out through the big door and waited for Mark to follow her. He felt reluctant to do so – he wanted to go back and look some more – but he could tell by her demeanour that the tour was finished.

The old lady pulled the door shut, and locked it again with the big key. Then she nodded into her flat.

‘That's where the housekeeper lived. She needed to be at the front to deal with all the tradesmen who would call throughout each day. Things didn't last. You didn't go to a supermarket like you do nowadays, and buy food frozen for the next month – you had it delivered, every day’

Now they were back in this small front area of the building, it was hard to remember that the rest of it even existed. The big, solid door, the old lady's small, tidy room: it was as if that was all there was.

‘It's weird, all that being back there,’ Mark said.

She looked tired now. ‘People are like that too.’

Mark didn't understand what she meant but it seemed as if she didn't want to say any more. His time down here was over. That was all right. It sounded as if the rain had started to slacken off. A walk along the seafront sounded okay now. The old lady walked behind him to the front door, and stood there as he stepped out.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘You're most welcome.’

He started up the narrow metal staircase up to the street, but hesitated, and turned around. ‘Do … other people know that's there?’

‘Other people?’ She knew who he meant. The person who owned this whole building. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don't believe he does. I've lived here for a long time and I don't get many visitors. The only person who knows about it is me. And now, you.’

She closed the door gently.

When Mark got up to the pavement the rain had stopped, though the sky was still low and a uniform grey. He pushed his hands deep into his coat pockets, and set off towards the promenade. He had some change in his back pocket. He thought maybe he'd go down to The Meeting Place and ask for a cup of tea, and ask them to make it strong.

He felt a little better than he had before.

So David didn't know everything there was to know, huh.




Chapter 6 (#uc3b41b36-a3c4-5772-80bd-0ac0561eceba)


IT STARTED TO rain again, however, and soon it became more like sleet. Mark stuck it out for a while but his cup of tea tasted like dishwater and was cold within moments. The promenade was deserted. The sea turned grey and choppy and a spray came up over the rail. Even the seagulls looked freezing and embittered.

When he got home he was soaked to the skin. He started up the stairs to see if his mother was awake yet but David was already waiting at the top, everything in his posture indicating a desire that Mark be quiet. He did everything short of actually holding his finger to his lips – as if he thought he was the gatekeeper, the person in charge of everything, with the power to decide who got access.

‘I want to talk to you later,’ he said.

Mark tramped back down the stairs without saying anything. He changed his clothes and dried his hair on a hand towel from the kitchen. Then he went into ‘his’ room and shut the door.

He read for a while, but soon finished his book. He didn't have any new ones, and until his mother felt like leaving the house so that they could all go further along the seafront to where the shops were, it didn't seem likely he'd be able to get hold of one. A couple of weeks ago, just after they'd got here, David had returned from one of his supermarket trips with a couple of books for Mark. They lay in a corner of the room, too boring even to open, and it seemed David had since forgotten about the idea of bearing Mark in mind. Mark wasn't going to help him to remember.

He played PlayStation for a while but that wasn't much fun either. The television in the old house in London was huge. You could turn the sound up and it was as if you were actually there. The one in his room in Brighton was the smallest he'd ever encountered, so small he wondered why Mr Sony had actually bothered. Even when you sat close it was as if it was the other side of the room, and the sound was like it was being played over a very old radio. Though it was comforting to go running along the same old corridors and dodging through jungles and abandoned mines that he'd visited many times before, it wasn't very exciting. He gave up in the end and went and sat in the chair facing the window. It rained and rained and rained, and then it stopped. When it got properly dark, lights began to come on again in the other houses on the opposite side of the square. You could see people walking around, sitting down, doing things. Having a life.

What he'd seen downstairs seemed a long way away, blurred by rain and the images of the video game. It was odd, the old lady living in such a small room at the front when there was so much space behind her: but he supposed she probably didn't have much money, and probably wasn't allowed to change things anyway. This was David's house now, after all – even if he'd let her stay down there because it had been her home, he was in charge.

David's house, yes. But he was not David's son. And the woman in the room over Mark's head was Mark's mother. She didn't belong to anyone else, whatever they might think.

When he tried again at six o'clock, David wasn't there to guard the stairs. Mark found his mother on the couch again. She looked less tired than she had yesterday, and was in a good mood. She patted the couch next to her and he went over and sat down.

She asked him about his day, as usual, but for some reason he didn't tell her about visiting the old lady. Partly it was because he'd realized that it probably contravened the warning about talking to strangers, or going anywhere with them – even though the old lady hadn't looked like a person who could do anyone much harm. But also he didn't mention it because…

Mark wasn't really sure why. Perhaps because she might mention it to David, and Mark didn't want him knowing what was down there. The omission made it sound as if Mark hadn't really done very much all day, however, and his mother picked up on this.

‘Maybe … we'll all go into town tomorrow,’ she said. ‘It's been a while. Don't you think?’

‘Really?’ Mark said. ‘That would be great. I need something new to read.’ He realized this sounded greedy, and anyway wasn't what he meant. ‘And it would just be, you know, nice.’

‘We'll have to see what the weather's like,’ said a voice.

It was David, of course, coming in from the bedroom. He wasn't drying his hands on a towel this time but the effect was about the same. ‘It would be great for us all to go into town. But it's gotten really cold today, and the rain, you know.’

Gotten. This was an American thing, Mark knew, because David had told him months ago, like he told you everything. But David was in England now, so why didn't he stop doing it? Did he think it made him sound cool, or something? It really didn't.

Mark was disappointed to see his mother nodding, conceding David's point. ‘But maybe?’ Mark said.

‘Maybe,’ she agreed, smiling. ‘Are you hungry? David said you didn't have any lunch.’

Of course he did. Reporting back.

‘Yes,’ Mark said. ‘What are we going to—’




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