The Dead of Summer Read online

  I stared at him.

  ‘Three a.m. If you’re not here. I’ll go without you.’

  Again I nodded and he looked at me for a few seconds more, let himself in and closed the door.

  twelve

  At home, Dad, Janice and Push were gazing at Dennis Waterman giving George Cole some cheek on telly, fish and chips and a bottle of cider on the floor between them. Push was lolling open-mouthed on one of the brand-new easy-chairs he’d just turned up with one day in his mate’s van. He said he’d found them on a skip which we all knew was bullshit but we sat on them anyway. He sprawled and squeaked restlessly on the shiny black leatherette. Cigarette smoke shifted in the hot muggy air like drifting snow.

  Janice was sat on the sofa with Dad and her piggy eyes pinged open in surprise as I crossed the room to sit on the chair next to Push. ‘You look tired, love,’ she said.

  ‘Yeh,’ I said, staring pointedly at the screen.

  ‘Busy little thing aren’t you?’ she went on, never one to be fobbed off easily. ‘I was only just saying to your dad: don’t see much of you, do we? Always out, always up to something.’ She eyed me greedily for a while.

  Dad glanced up, tried a smile, looked blearily back at the screen.

  ‘See you with that Kyle Kite quite a lot,’ continued Janice. I didn’t answer, just carried on staring at the telly. ‘Funny boy, isn’t he?’ She examined her chipped nail polish. ‘Never did really take to him.’

  ‘I’m sure he’d be devastated,’ I said under my breath.

  ‘What’s that, love?’ asked Janice.

  I shook my head and slunk further down in my seat but Janice whined on through the telly-noise and the mugginess.

  ‘Used to see him and his little sister playing in the street. Poor little mite. She was always a treasure, used to wave at me when I walked past. Something funny about him, though.’ She pursed her lips. ‘Sorry, love, I know he’s your mate, but to tell you the God’s honest he’s always given me the creeps. Those funny eyes of his.’ She shuddered theatrically.

  Nobody was paying any attention to Janice, even I was pretending not to. When I was little, I once pushed half a jellybean into my ear and couldn’t get it out again. Janice’s voice that night gave me the same sort of feeling.

  ‘I remember this one time, not that long before the poor little love disappeared. I stopped to talk to her in the street, just to say Hello like and she was telling me all about her dollies. And suddenly that Kyle one just comes from nowhere, runs up to us and yanks his sister’s arm nearly out of her socket. “Told you not to talk to strangers,” he’s going. Then he pulls her back down the street and into their house and she’s crying all the way. “Kyle” she’s going, crying her eyes out and I’m not surprised, he had hold of her that tight. “Let go of my arm, you’re hurting me,” she goes. Then he practically boots her through their front door.’ Janice wrinkled her nose and nodded her head decisively. ‘No, nasty piece of work that one. You best stay well clear, love.’

  I continued staring at the TV and finally Janice gave up and stopped eyeballing me. The room’s stuffiness and TV sounds coated me like warm oil and I felt myself sinking into something like sleep. But shifting in my seat, I felt suddenly the hard weight of the penknife dig against my thigh. Instantly I saw again the blade touching then piercing Mike’s flesh; replaying in my mind was the blood, the dead grey stare of Kyle’s eyes. And I thought back to when I’d first held the knife in my hands and had run the blade across my own flesh, how the steel and red plastic had gleamed and trembled in my palm.

  I thought of Kyle’s face and then without warning came the sickly sliding thoughts I hadn’t had since I was six. They came creeping, seeping through the sleepy fug, and then came the slicing heat behind my eyes. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t stop them from returning. After all those years, suddenly there they were again, unwelcome guests at a crap party. Old enemies reneging on a long-held truce.

  ‘I’m off out.’ Jarred awake, I stared dumbly after my brother as he slammed out of the house, then down at a plate of beans on toast, grown cold, placed there on the arm of my chair by Janice, minutes or hours before.

  I went to bed early, slept immediately; a thick, muddy sleep from which I woke to the sound of gravel on my window. Alert and panicky suddenly, I looked at the clock: 03.06 a.m. ‘Shit!’ I said out loud and heard Esha murmur a sleepy response as I grabbed at the net and looked out into the street to where Kyle stood, staring back at me. I pulled on my clothes and was out of the door and next to him by seven minutes past.

  A nod, a look, something understood. That walk, that long, dark walk to Greenwich the best, the happiest, the surest I’d ever felt.

  It took us almost an hour. Through Brockley, down to Lewisham, up to Blackheath. On the way the yellow streaking flash of night buses, a few, grey, shadowy forms inside; a shouting puddle of piss-drenched rags in a doorway, a woman running, crying in high heels, but mostly silence, mostly dark, warm silence. And then the heath stretching out, moonlit and flat before us, the lights of London singing below.

  I remember we didn’t really speak on the way – I remember because when Kyle did suddenly say something it made me jump to hear his thin quiet voice, like a mosquito landing on still water. He said, as if it had just occurred to him, and like he wasn’t really that interested, ‘So, where is your mum, then?’

  ‘Dead,’ I said, too surprised to elaborate. He nodded as if my answer satisfied him completely and I felt encouraged to ask him a question of my own, though as soon as I’d said it I felt reckless and clumsy.

  ‘Your mum,’ I said, watching for his reaction. ‘Why’s she, so … you know?’

  He didn’t answer right away, and we walked on for a few minutes in silence. I was sure that he was angry, and I braced myself.

  But, ‘She’s delicate,’ he said finally. ‘Granddad says we need to look after her. He says she’s not …’ he paused, searching for the right words. ‘She’s not very well.’ It was a vague enough answer but still it made me feel a little queasy, because the way he said it reminded me of a little boy reciting something drummed into him long ago. ‘Her nerves couldn’t take it.’ He added as if that explained everything. Although what ‘it’ was, he didn’t say.

  I thought of the three of them in that big old house, of Kyle and Patrick tending to Elizabeth like she was a sickly child, stepping around her softly as if around a cut-glass vase, and I shivered. A picture popped into my head of a straw doll, and Patrick and Kyle with burning matches in their hands. I felt like I should say something in response and thought about cracking a joke about his family being almost as mad as mine, but decided against it. We walked on in silence for a while until I could bear it no longer. I had to ask him. And a part of me listened in disbelief to my voice as it spoke the words.

  ‘What happened to your little sister, Kyle? What happened to Katie? You know, don’t you?’

  A sudden intake of breath and a sharp turn of his head to look at me then quickly away again and I closed my eyes, stealing myself for his fury. His voice, when he spoke, was like the strike of a match. ‘Mind your own business, Anita.’

  I nodded, not looking at him, miserable for bringing it up, but then he stopped walking. We had reached the main road that slices through the heath and under the glow of a street lamp we faced each other. He looked at me in silence for a while, then opened his mouth to speak but seemed unable to get the words out, a look in his eyes like someone trying to push a car uphill. Without thinking I reached out and touched him on the arm. Said, ‘What is it, Kyle?’ and he flinched from me. ‘Sorry,’ I said, in agony by then, and put my hands in my pockets out of harm’s way.

  Again he tried to speak, but could only manage a splutter, little drops of spit flying from his mouth like pins. In the lamp light his eyes like knives. ‘I,’ he said. ‘I …’

  ‘What?’ I whispered.

  We stared at each other.

  ‘Just fuck off,’ he shouted and I jumped ou
t of my miserable skin. He crouched down suddenly, his head in his hands.

  ‘Kyle,’ I said, close to crying. ‘Kyle, please don’t.’

  Tears in his eyes shocking me into silence.

  A night bus passed, its only passenger swivelling to stare down at us from the top deck. Still Kyle crouched there and I knew he was oblivious to my presence. I reached out and touched his shoulder and this time he didn’t react at all, so lost was he. He stayed there, clenched tightly away from everything and as my hand rested on his shoulder suddenly the feelings from before, from another life, the feelings I’d almost managed to forget, came back so strongly I almost lost my balance. They flooded my mind and I backed away from him.

  Kyle straightened up at last and pulled himself together. ‘Just mind your own fucking business,’ he whispered. And we walked on. At the gates of the castle we waited, listening to the barking of a dog. Then we followed the high brick wall around until it disappeared into dense shadows and trees. ‘Over here,’ said Kyle by its lowest point and we pulled ourselves up and over into the garden on the other side.

  We found wide lawns bathed in moonlight and the castle looming black against the dirty orange sky. We ran from it, towards the edge of the grounds, past children’s swings and roundabouts and a pen full of sleeping goats. ‘Here.’ Kyle stopped by a high wire gate in a fence and I saw that below us the ground dropped away steeply and there it was: a sunken forest. Black and damp; quivering, almost breathing in the darkness.

  A secret forest by a castle. It sounds like fairy-tale bullshit but it was there, still is, I expect; nestling amongst the big town houses and carefully manicured gardens of Greenwich like a guilty secret. A sunken forest about the size of two tennis courts that you had to scrabble and slide down a muddy slope to get to.

  Kyle switched on the torch he had brought with him, because there, under the trees, it was pitch-black. Slowly we moved between the trunks and through vines and weeds and dead leaves, following the beam. There was a damp and heavy coolness that I hadn’t even known I’d been longing for all those weeks. Neither of us spoke. I felt like we were the only people left in the world. Or like we were on our own planet, spinning a billion miles away from the confusing, relentless light of earth. I will never forget that, the two of us walking there together. I don’t think I had ever been so happy. We were so close, so at ease with each other. I didn’t want it to end and I think he felt the same way too. Our friendship seemed to stretch out into the evening and fill every corner of that cool, dark place.

  And then, ‘Here.’

  Kyle was shining the torch into a clearing and as we got nearer I saw that at the end of his beam the earth rose in a low arch. I felt the air around us tremble and stretch with Kyle’s excitement as he began to pull away bracken and branches to reveal the opening of a bunker; stone steps leading down to blackness.

  I followed him down to an arched, brick chamber, it had a musty, sweet smell, a dry warmth. ‘I wonder what it was for?’ I asked, breaking the silence. But Kyle didn’t answer. We sat on the ground for a while and I felt his happiness there in the darkness, under the sunken forest, under the world. I didn’t tell him that I wasn’t that impressed – it was just a small, man-made cellar after all. But I let him have his satisfaction. Kept quiet about my secret. There was better, deeper, bigger, I knew. I already knew there was, although I hadn’t yet told Kyle.

  He turned the flashlight off and we sat in silence for a while. The easy, warm feeling between us seemed to deepen there in the darkness. Finally he said, ‘Anita?’

  ‘Yeh?’ I said. He was silent for a moment or two. I heard his breathing become ragged and realised he was crying. I didn’t know what to do; I dared not risk touching him again. ‘Kyle,’ I said. ‘Kyle, what is it?’ He didn’t answer, and I listened to him gasp in the blackness. After some time he said, ‘It was me. Anita. It was me,’ and his sobbing became so loud and desperate suddenly that I reached out and felt for his arm, but when I found him he pulled away.

  ‘What was you, Kyle?’ I asked, desperately. ‘Tell me. Please, tell me what you mean.’ But he wouldn’t say another word, and gradually his sobs subsided and he was quiet. Minutes passed and finally he said, so quietly I had to strain to hear him, ‘I want to stay here for a bit. On my own.’

  All right,’ I said. ‘I don’t mind.’ And I didn’t. I understood. I heard him put the torch down and curl up, his breathing becoming more steady and shallow.

  ‘Come out before it gets light,’ I said. ‘You don’t want to get caught.’

  I left, finding my way back in the dark to the wire gates, then running back across the moonlit lawns.

  I went to Point Hill. I sat on the bench in the little park that overlooks the city and thought about Kyle sleeping down there under the earth, the need in him to be deep beneath the traffic and river and houses and people. To hide far below the world with all its noise and fury. I looked down at the valley of lights and thought again of the blood pouring from Mike’s leg, Kyle’s dead, grey stare as he plunged the knife into denim and flesh and Mike’s incredulous screams. And the question that had always been there, the question I’d never dare ask again. What had happened to Katie, all those months ago? Where was Kyle’s sister now?

  I pulled the penknife from my pocket, opened the biggest blade and stroked the shining steel. I looked up at the stars which held the sky in a vast and brilliant net despite the pink light beginning to bleed from the horizon. I soaked up the immensity of the city below me and I felt such a sudden strength and power and happiness I stood up on the bench and raised my arms above my head. I felt myself soar over London, swooping down from Point Hill over the lights shining from a million naked bulbs. A million headlamps from a million cars moving between a million streetlights. And as I stood there a million keys turned inside me, a million doors suddenly opened.

  There, high above London I felt my heart connect with Kyle’s sleeping far below me. And I flew above the city, his protector, the blade in my fist.

  thirteen

  New Cross Hospital. 4 September 1986. Transcription of interview between Dr C Barton and Anita Naidu. Police copy.

  He didn’t speak to me, I guess he just wanted to get on with it. He left the hole uncovered and I could see the rock in his hand and I could see his eyes but it must have been harder for him to see me, you know what I mean? For his eyes to adjust to the light and that, because he never saw the knife in my hand. He never saw the knife. When he found me he lifted up the rock to slam into my face, to finish me the same way he’d finished the others, and without even aiming at his throat, that’s where the knife got him. I had to. I had to kill him before he killed me. And afterwards, I didn’t run immediately. You’d think I would, wouldn’t you but I didn’t, I just sat with them lying all around me, and the sun shining in on them through the hole and it was so quiet, so completely quiet. I sat there for a little while because I knew that as soon as I got up, as soon as I got up and ran and left them behind it would all be real. Do you know what I mean? As soon as I left the mine the future would start and I would be the person that this had happened to and there would be no way back. So I sat there with my friends for a few moments. And then I got up and I just ran.

  Malcolm has light-brown eyes and when he looks at me I feel happy-panicky. Excited-sad. Two weeks ago we went to our café again, and on the way there he picked up my hand and held it. I just froze, Doctor Barton. My mind went blank with panic. I shook his hand off and ran away. Just left him there in the street. Can you believe that? Ran all the way back home and didn’t answer the door when he knocked. He kept coming back all afternoon, kept knocking. ‘Please,’ he kept saying, through the door. ‘Please. I’m really, really sorry, Anita. Please. Anita, please.’ But I didn’t answer, and finally he went away. We were supposed to be going to the cinema that night.

  But you don’t want to hear about that, do you, Doctor Barton? You didn’t come all this way, write me all those letters just to hear about
Malcolm and me. No, you wanted a catch-up, didn’t you: a little reunion with your favourite patient.

  It wasn’t my fault. None of it was my fault.

  I didn’t see Kyle for two days after the night of the castle, and I thought I’d go mad, I was so desperate to talk to him. I’d started to feel like things didn’t really make sense when I wasn’t with him, like I didn’t really exist if he wasn’t around.

  By Tuesday afternoon the waiting was driving me nuts. I stood for a while by our front-room window just staring out at his house, waiting for him to appear. After a while I went and sat on our front step. I thought about how school would be starting in a week, how all the streets and buses would be filled with kids in uniform, me amongst them. A faceless stream of children all dressed the same, all looking the same. That day I was wearing a pair of Push’s shorts and the sun was beating down on my knees. I covered them with my hands and the sun bit into them instead. I stared across at the big black door with the two threes, willing it to open.

  After an hour I told myself to stop being stupid and tried to make myself get up and knock on Kyle’s door. But I couldn’t do it. I kept remembering the time in the park, when he’d shouted at me and told me to stay away from his house. I knew that things had changed since then; I knew that everything was entirely different between us now, but still I couldn’t quite face it. That’s when I remembered the penknife. I still had it. It was upstairs under my mattress. Kyle’s birthday present. Surely Patrick would ask Kyle where it was? Surely Kyle would want it back? He’d want it back right away, wouldn’t he? Course he would.

  I ran upstairs and was back in seconds. Hesitated for only a moment, then went over to Kyle’s before I changed my mind. Up the four steps to his door, my hand on the knocker, then I stopped. It was open. The door was ajar. I stared at it like a moron for a few moments. Then knocked. The door shifted open another inch. I waited. Nothing. I put my ear to the gap and listened. Nothing. I peered in, nudging the door another inch. Nobody. I knocked again, waited, then went in.