The Servants. M. Smith M.

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

      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.

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