The Hiding Place(72)

I nod toward the armchair. “Sit. Abbie-Eyes loves company.”

He eyes the doll. “This is probably stating the obvious but sitting here talking to a one-eyed doll is even more bloody creepy than talking to yourself.”

He removes Abbie-Eyes and places her on the floor with a shudder, then sits and clasps his mug. The holdall rests at his feet. I look down at it.

“I was expecting a courier, not personal delivery.”

“Yeah, well, I figured the petrol was cheaper.”

“You haven’t got a car.”

“I borrowed my sister’s.”

“What about work?”

“I can give it a miss for a couple of days. And I’m glad I did. Because you look like shit, my man. Countryside air does not agree with you.”

I rub at my eyes. “Well, I won’t be breathing it much longer.”

One way or another.

“Your plan is coming to fruition.”

“Something like that.”

“Is that why you’ve got a pack of playing cards out?”

I glance at the hands of cards I have dealt on the table.

“I was just killing time.”

“You’re not planning on winning your money back?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Thank feck for that. Don’t take this wrong, but you’re a shit cardplayer.”

“And you couldn’t have told me that before someone made matchsticks out of my leg?”

“You’ve got to want to hear it.” He looks down at the holdall. “So, presumably—and I don’t think I’ll be stepping on Sherlock’s toes when I deduce this—it has something to do with what’s in this bag?”

“Bravo, dear Watson.”

“So?”

I raise an eyebrow. Or at least, I try. The effort is a little too much tonight.

“Someone is going to pay me a lot of money not to take that to the police.” I lean forward and lift the holdall onto the coffee table. “Have you looked inside?”

“I figured if you wanted me to know, you’d show me.”

I unzip the top and carefully take out a bulky shape wrapped in an old sweatshirt. I unfold the sweatshirt, revealing two items carefully preserved inside a clear plastic bag: A crowbar, and a dark blue school tie, darker in places, where it soaked up the blood. My sister’s blood. Just visible, a name sewn into it: S. Hurst.

“What the feck is this?” Brendan asks.

“Payback.”





31





1992


Falling doesn’t kill you. Stopping kills you.

That’s what Chris told me.

People think that when you fall from a great height your brain shuts down before you hit the ground.

Not true. It’s possible, because of the speed at which your brain processes information, that it may not have time to consciously comprehend the actual impact. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t furiously working all the way down.

Right until the final crunch.


—



I had English in the Block, last period, the day that Chris fell. We read from Animal Farm. I never liked that novel. I was not then, or now, a fan of overly heavy-handed symbolism.

In my fifteen-year-old opinion, you could just as easily have told the story with people instead of dressing it up with animals. I didn’t see the point. I didn’t like the conceit. It was like the author thought he was being clever and no one could see through his book pretending to be one thing when it wasn’t. But you could. And it wasn’t clever. It was like a magic act, where you could see the trick but the magician still thought they were all that.

Orwell wasn’t all that. But Nineteen Eighty-Four was good. It didn’t pretend. It was just harsh and scary and brutal.

To be fair, I wasn’t thinking much about the book during this particular lesson. I was distracted. I’d been distracted a lot over the previous few weeks.

Annie had been back for almost a month. The initial euphoria and attention had faded. But it still should have been a happy time. Things should have been getting back to normal. But they weren’t. I wasn’t even sure I knew what normal was anymore.

For the first few days I tried to talk to Annie. To coax out of her what had happened that night. But she just stared at me with eyes that were muddy with incomprehension. Occasionally, she smiled or giggled for no reason. The sound of her laughter, which had always made me feel warm inside, now set my teeth on edge like nails down a blackboard.

Mum still wasn’t around much because she was spending most of her time caring for Nan, who “wasn’t doing so well” after the fall. Dad had taken leave from work to help look after Annie until she was ready to go back to school. Or so he said. It wasn’t true. I had seen a letter sticking out of his jacket pocket one evening. At the top, it read: “P45.” I knew what that meant. That he had left his job or been fired. I tucked the letter farther into his pocket and didn’t say a word to Mum.

There were a lot of things I wasn’t telling Mum. Couldn’t tell her. Because I didn’t want to worry her. Because I didn’t want to make her unhappy. Because I was scared she wouldn’t believe me.

I didn’t tell her that I had started to dread going home after school because Dad would already be drunk and the house would stink. Not just of booze. Of something worse. Something fetid and sour. The sort of smell you might get when something has crawled under the floorboards to die. Mum even sent Dad and me looking for a dead mouse one night. When we couldn’t find anything she rolled her eyes and said, “I’m sure it will pass.”