The Servants

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

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

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.’