“Of course. Let’s go, let’s go.”
Larissa was hopping gently from one foot to the other, such was her excitement at the prospect at being allowed to leave her cell, to stand under the open sky again, to feel the night air in her hair.
“Not just yet,” said Jamie, and smiled at her.
She stopped still, and looked at him.
I don’t like that smile, she thought. I don’t like it at all.
“Why?” she asked, cautiously.
“You’re going to tell me something first. And you’re going to tell me the truth.”
Chapter 28
ALL THE FUN OF THE FAIR
READING, ENGLAND 24TH JULY 2004
Larissa Kinley knew it was early before she opened her eyes; it was too dark in her bedroom, too quiet. She forced her gummy eyelids open and saw that she was right. The digital alarm clock on her bedside table read 5:06 in glowing green letters. She sat up in bed and stretched her arms above her head, yawning widely. It was the eighth night in a row that she had found herself awake when she should be asleep, watching the green numbers tick over until she could legitimately get up and go in the shower. She hadn’t told her parents about what she was beginning to think qualified as insomnia; she knew that they would nod, half-heartedly sympathise, and then go back to whatever they were doing.
Larissa rolled out of bed and walked over to her bedroom window. She was about to open it, to let some fresh air into the room in the hope that it would tire her out, when she looked down into the small garden at the back of their little semi-detached house, and clapped her hand over her mouth so she didn’t scream.
The old man was standing in her garden, looking up at her with a gentle smile on his face, his grey overcoat wrapped around him, his hands casually in his pockets. His eyes were bright in the soft orange light of the streetlight that stood beyond the garden fence and horribly, revoltingly friendly.
She took a step backwards and tripped over one of the leather boots she had dropped at the end of her bed the night before. Her arms wheeled as she tried to keep her balance, but it was futile. She fell to the floor, hard, her teeth clicking shut on her tongue and sending a dagger of agony through her head. Tasting blood in her mouth, she scrambled to her knees and crawled back to the window. She inched her head above the windowsill and looked down into the garden.
The man was gone.
There was no more sleep for Larissa that night. She lay on her bed, playing the events of the previous two days over and over in her head, looking for a way to put the pieces together. She was still trying when she heard her brother’s bedroom door thump open, and she got up and raced across the landing, shoving him out of the way and closing the bathroom door behind her. Liam hammered half-heartedly on the door, but they both knew how this game went, and he quickly gave up and went back to his room.
Standing in front of the mirror, Larissa poked her tongue out and looked at the tiny cut her teeth had made. She sucked the blood away, watched it instantly well up again, then brushed her teeth, carefully, and stepped into the shower. She emerged twenty minutes later with her mind no clearer; every time she managed to push the old man out of her head and think about something else – her coursework, the funfair she and her friends were going to that evening – he would suddenly appear, smiling his soft smile, staring at her with those wide, friendly eyes.
Her parents were already sat at the table when she made her way downstairs to breakfast, her wet hair wrapped in a towel and piled on her head. Her dad was reading the business section of The Times and slowly demolishing half a grapefruit, while her mother nibbled unconvincingly at a piece of toast and stared into thin air. Neither of them said anything as she sat down and poured herself a bowl of cornflakes and a glass of orange juice. She again considered telling them about the old man, but decided against it.
She knew Liam felt it too, although he refused to talk about it with her. Their father had stopped going to Liam’s football matches at the start of the summer, without ever offering an explanation or an apology, as though he had simply forgotten that it was something he used to do. Larissa knew it had hurt her brother more deeply than he would ever admit, particularly to his big sister, but he had never questioned his dad about it. It was obvious that something bigger than football was going on: a dark cloud of depression had descended on him at the start of the year and showed no signs of lifting. She was sure that telling them about the old man would bring nothing more than tired suggestions that she had had a nightmare, that there was nothing to worry about.
Even if she told them it was the third day in a row she had seen him.
Larissa ate her cereal in silence, said goodbye to her parents as they left for work, then went upstairs. As she passed her brother’s room she saw him sitting at his desk in his school uniform, instant messaging with someone, probably one of the large number of seemingly identical adolescent boys who were his friends. They were polite and more than a little shy when she answered the door to them in the evenings, but she nearly always caught their eyes crawling over her chest, and it made her shudder.
“Morning, Liam,” she said.
He grunted, which Larissa knew was the best she was likely to get from him.
In her room, Larissa pushed the pages of her coursework around her desk for the next couple of hours, her mind on anything but Jane Austen. She made herself some lunch, downloaded some music, lay on her bed, paced around her bedroom, and generally killed time until it was time to go to the fair. Her father was getting out of his car when she stepped out of the house, and he waved a half-hearted greeting at her. She returned it with an equal lack of enthusiasm, and he stopped her as she passed him.
“Are you OK?” he asked, peering at her from sleepy, hooded eyes.
“I’m fine, Dad,” she snapped. “What about you? Are you OK?”
Her father looked at her, then dropped his gaze.
“That’s what I thought,” she said, and walked down the driveway and out on to the street, the heels of her boots clicking furiously along the pavement.
The funfair was an annual event, beloved by the town’s teenagers and children alike. The kids loved the dodgems, the small roller coaster, the Barrel Roll and the Chair-O-Planes; the teenagers loved the neon lights, the dark corners where they could kiss, the games and the arcades. It was, in truth, little more than a collection of sideshows with two or three half-decent rides, but the strips of lights mingled with the scents of candyfloss and roasting nuts and the tinny soundtrack to create something that was slightly magical.
All this was lost on Larissa’s friend Amber, who was enthusiastically kissing a boy from their history class, her back pressed against the wall of the coconut shy, her hands holding his firmly at his sides so he didn’t get any ideas about putting them anywhere else. The rest of the girls had wandered off to smoke a spliff behind the dodgems, and Larissa found herself alone. She waited a few minutes for Amber to disentangle herself from the boy, who had greasy hair and acne, but Amber seemed in no hurry to do so, even though he was the third boy she had kissed in the little over an hour they had been at the fair. Eventually Larissa wandered away.
She walked down the funfair’s main street and out into the darkness of the park, following the fence that separated the fields from the main road. Cars sped past her, their headlights blazing, snatches of music floating from open windows, and she was overcome with a sense of sorrow and loss. Her hands shook as she dragged a pack of Marlboro Lights from her pocket, pulled one from the box, and applied the small yellow flame of her lighter to the tip.
“Those things will kill you.”
Larissa jumped, her heart lurching in her chest, at the sound of the old man’s voice. She knew it was him even as she was turning towards the source of the words; the voice was extraordinary, unlike any other