The Servants. M. Smith M.

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ