like something separate from everything else.
The candles are lit, but now he can see they’re just lightbulbs which flicker like flames. He counts them, eleven, twelve, thirteen . . . then there is the door to the in-between passage, but the stairs keep counting . . . fourteen, fifteen . . .
‘It doesn’t go anywhere, Michael.’ That’s her again. ‘The door at the bottom’s all locked up!’
And it is, because, suddenly, in front of him is nothing but another great big, flat, hard, cold wall. He runs his hands over it and feels the difference between the bricks on one side and stone on the other. Just as he had gone up as far as he could, now he has gone down as far as he can. Something about the wall at the top and the wall at the bottom spoils everything. The door is locked. His aunt appears out of the shadows behind him.
‘Look,’ she says, trying to be all friendly. The key fits the lock first time, she pulls heavily on the door, and light comes cheating into the tower from the lawn which is lit up like a prison camp in a war film when the spotlights come on when you try to escape; it’s luminous green and strange. It seems impossible somewhere so wide, so open, so bright can exist on the other side of this small blackness.
‘And this is where the builders have made a new hole and the spiral staircase will go on down and down to the pool. They’ve bricked it up to be safe.’
Wine breath. She locks the door again. It’s so dark he can’t see her or her new wall, but he can feel her, like she might spark if he poked her, he can hear her telling him to follow. He doesn’t want to stay at the bottom of the tower all on his own, but he doesn’t want to do what she tells him to do either. Just for a second, he sits down. He might stay there and they’ll all forget him and he’ll knock a hole through her bricks and go all the way down to the empty pool and lie down there and die down there like the people in the graves at the cemetery and then they’ll all be sorry. He’s sure he wouldn’t be the first body to be found in her ugly tower. He hoots like an owl.
‘Hello,’ he calls out to the ghosts. ‘Hello echo.’
Chapter Eight
Even the kitchen would have been nicer than this, thinks Mikey, but they’re eating in the huge dining room because Diana wanted to do things properly for them. The table is much too big for three people and it all smells like air freshener, but it might be the real flowers. There’s no ketchup and the lasagne is slimy and everything is made of silver so he can see his reflection bent out of shape wherever he looks. His mum is drinking too much too fast; it’s a long time since she was properly drunk so he feels sad and a little scared. Diana is probably drunk too, but she is fixed together tightly, so it isn’t so easy to tell if she’s falling apart. It hasn’t taken long. All evening it’s been the same: one moment arm in arm, giggling about the seesaw in the park opposite where they used to live, and the next squabbling like girls in the playground. Brothers and sisters always argue, that’s what his friends do, but they just argue over stuff; maybe that’s what they’re arguing about, stuff, because Diana has a lot of stuff and his mum doesn’t have much stuff at all.
‘Just because I made something of myself and you haven’t,’ Diana is saying.
She can’t have made all this, she must have bought it.
‘Lady Muck!’ says his mum, reaching for the bottle. ‘You wait!’
If Solomon was with them it wouldn’t all be down to him.
‘Off you go to bed, Mikey! Give your mum a big, big kiss!’
Over his mother’s shoulder, Mikey can see his aunt raising her eyes. His mum’s neck smells of smoke, but that’s only because today is difficult and just one probably won’t kill her. Once he made a secret list of all the things that could kill her and then crossed them off so they wouldn’t. He’s the one who’ll do the killing, he’ll kill all her enemies, like Diana, for instance, rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat in his head goes his imaginary machine gun.
As he leaves, he overhears his aunt say something about him not being much of a talker. In the hall, with full on acting, he rat-a-tat-tats his aunt again, then he crouches on the bottom stair straining to hear what they’re saying, letting the ticking and the tocking of the grandfather clock match his pulse. The dog is shut in the kitchen, which is sad for them both. When Mikey’s been there what he thinks is probably a very long time and their voices are getting louder and his heart is beating faster than the clock allows, he struggles with the golden knob on the dining-room door which slides round between his hot hands and sneaks back into the room. Opposite each other at the table, his aunt is leaning forwards, jabbing her finger at his mum’s face. He doesn’t think they’ll hit each other because they’re both women, but he isn’t sure. When there was a girl fight at school, Ali said, ‘They scratched each other’s eyes out.’ ‘Really?’ Mikey asked him. ‘Really,’ Ali confirmed.
Sifting through his word bank of phrases, Mikey selects something a child might say at a time like this. ‘Night night, then, Mum!’ he says. ‘Thank you for supper, Diana.’
Neither of them even notice he is there.
‘Are you coming to bed soon, Mum?’
His aunt is bending down, picking up something from the floor and his mother is lighting another cigarette from a candle, the wax dripping onto the table, the flame that close to her hair. He is a nobody.
‘Fuck,’ he says.
‘What’s he doing out of bed?’
‘Mikey, go back to your room. Now. I’m not joking.’
‘Fuck.’ He slams the door hard behind him, it’s the rudest and worst thing he can think of saying. ‘Fuck you,’ he shouts as he runs through the horrid hall in his slippery socks and up the stairs, and there is the door wide open and the bedside light on all ready for him and he throws himself under the duvet and pulls it over him until there is nothing of him showing. If anyone comes creeping through the house to kill him, even if the black birds from the forest come pecking on his window, they won’t even know he’s there, he’s that invisible, that quiet. And if he has to leave in a hurry, he still has his funeral clothes on and his rucksack packed and his trainers are ready by the front door. He knows how to escape, he does it all the time on Lockdown.
Downstairs, his exit provides the right-shaped space for the argument to grow. Valerie can physically feel the size of the tumour between her hands.
‘Charming little boy you’ve brought him up to be,’ says Diana, sweeping crumbs across the polished surface of the dining room table into her palm.
‘You’re just jealous,’ Valerie slurs. ‘Even you haven’t been able to buy children.’
The heavy curtains are letting in a line of light from the security lamp outside. Diana corrects them and then resumes drip-feeding her abuse. Words spit from her like unpalatable food – chav, pissed, failure – they land on Valerie and dribble down her dress, adding to all the other stains where Paul has spilled his filth over the years.
‘We’re not so different after all. We’ve both been in the gutter, it’s just that your gutter is better decorated than my gutter.’ Valerie stubs her cigarette out in the butter dish. ‘And we both live on estates, so that’s hilarious when you think about it.’
‘For Christ’s sake!’ Diana tips the bottle before noticing it is already empty. In
