The Silence. Joss Stirling

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       Chapter 17

       Jonah, One year Ago

      Jonah turned a corner out of sight of the house, put his head down, hands on knees, and breathed through his nose. He wasn’t going to throw up, he promised himself. Bridget had only asked for a kiss on the cheek, nothing more.

      One … and two … and three. His school counsellor would be proud of him.

      OK, mate, under control now? He could almost hear Mark’s soothing tones, counting him down from his full-blown panic mode. Yeah, I’m OK. Just one of my tripwires: being kissed by an older woman, smelling that ladylike perfume, brushing up against the soft pillowy skin. Shit. Don’t think about it.

      Jonah forced himself to stand up and saw that his sudden stop in the middle of the pavement had persuaded a mother with a pushchair to cross the road. She was watching him with that suspicion he was so used to seeing, tugging her toddler close to her skirts, a hen gathering in her chicks. He tried to defuse her panic by smiling at them, but that only made it worse. Don’t look at the nasty man, darling. She was practically running for the shops, toddler trailing, his packet of crisps scattering. Jonah could hear his wailing protests.

      What the hell am I doing here? A year on and he still wasn’t used to it. He looked up at the multimillionaire homes, the waxed-to-a-shine German cars parked on paved driveways, the manicured gardens. No wonder she ran. She probably thinks I’m housebreaking. Shows how much she knows. These houses would be a difficult target – alarmed and sensored up to the hilt, probably staff coming and going unpredictably, almost certainly big dogs. A bite on the arse was no joking matter, as Jonah knew from experience. A different grade of housebreaker went for this kind. If you wanted to make a quick quid, you went for the easy marks, the laptop left briefly unattended in a café, the house full of students where they’d each have a couple of grand of electrical goods, the neighbourhoods where no one bothered to watch for strangers as they didn’t even know what the people downstairs looked like. You could jimmy a back door or window, grab whatever your contacts on the black market would fence, and be gone before anyone knew you’d been there. The police hardly bothered to investigate that kind of crime.

      Jonah began to feel more at ease, more anonymous by the time he got to the train. There were a few people like him on the London Bridge service: scruffy, hungry-looking men, all watching each other to see where the trouble would start. Not with me, mate, he thought, keeping his eyes down on the free newspaper. The passengers would probably be gobsmacked to find out that the dangerous-looking guy with the tats was actually heading for afternoon classes in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts Gower Street studios. How fucking posh was that? He wanted to laugh at the preposterous sound of it: him at RADA! But laughing suddenly was another thing that didn’t go down well in public.

      His class would be immediately followed by his call at six for the night shoot: hair, makeup and wardrobe in a trailer parked in the backstreets of Hackney. Yeah, filming was so glamorous. He only had one line – ‘Don’t worry, love, we’ll find out’, spoken to some road traffic accident victim as they stretchered her into the ambulance – so he didn’t need much time to prepare despite what he’d said to Bridget. It wasn’t exactly Shakespeare this hospital soap, but the money was good.

      The train rounded a curve and the Shard slid into view, the icy heart of the city. If he knew that more work like the soap was in the pipeline then he’d be in a financial position to move to somewhere more central where his presence would go unnoticed. The ugly truth was that he was stuck for now because his credit history was crap and his past unlikely to make him anyone’s first choice of tenant. Gallant House was his best of bad options. To stay all he had to do was curb his language and fall in with Bridget’s pretence they were a family.

      Jonah wondered what the new tenant made of him. Kris had treated him like a younger brother, the wet-behind-the-ears squaddie in Bridget’s brigade, Kris the NCO. Nothing Jonah said or did shocked him as he’d seen worse. Jenny’s silence was interesting, by contrast, a challenge even. She wasn’t really quiet though, was she? Her instrument was a means of expression, and so was her body language. At college, they were taught to think about what a character said with all of his or her faculties, not just speech. It was a useful training. СКАЧАТЬ