Devil's Rock - Chris Speyer [41]
‘You lied! You lied!’ Michael’s voice was on the edge of tears.
‘That’s not true, Michael.’
‘Yes it is! It is!’
‘Michael, listen . . .’
‘Why? Why should I? Why should I believe anything you tell me?’
‘Michael . . .’
‘You lied!’
‘Michael, this isn’t helping.’
‘I don’t care!’
‘Michael, please . . .’
‘I hate you!’
‘Michael, listen to me . . .’
Zaki began to retreat. He didn’t want to hear those voices, those words. One step back and then another and another and another, as though he could rewind time, creep back from this moment and then edge around it, reach the future by a different route. He found himself in the passage between the house and the fence. He pushed his back against the wall, pushed his head hard against it; by only moving his eyes he could see to the left and right. There was nobody in sight. The tarry smell of creosote spread across through the evening air from the high wooden fence that screened him from the world. He waited. He could only hear the usual neighbourhood sounds; birds twittered, someone strimmed weeds, distant traffic.
He began to count. ‘When I reach a hundred,’ he told himself, ‘I’ll go round.’ He reached one hundred and decided to go on to one hundred and fifty. One hundred and fifty came and went and he counted on, one number following another like links in an endless chain running through his head. He counted until he heard the front door slam and his father calling after his brother. He listened. He didn’t hear the front door reopen and close again. Had they both gone out? He crept around to the back door and opened it very carefully. All was quiet in the house, but some new thing had been released, something that now lurked in the corners, lurked in the dark spaces behind the furniture, something that made the air in the house more difficult to breath. Zaki stood just inside the kitchen door and examined the room, examined the mundane, household objects that, by being abandoned, had taken on a sinister significance; a partly chopped onion and a knife on the chopping board, the cutlery draw left open, potatoes boiling in a pan of water on the cooker, building plans for Number 43 spread out on the kitchen table. There was nothing to explain the source of the argument. Zaki took the knife from the chopping board and prodded the potatoes. They seemed to be cooked. Should he take them off? He slid the pan off the ring and turned off the cooker. Now what? Moving carefully, as though through a minefield, he made his way upstairs.
The door to his brother’s room was open. Michael’s guitar lay across his rumpled bed. His phone was in the middle of the floor along with his school sweatshirt and trousers and his rucksack. Zaki crossed the room and sat on the bed. He brushed a fingernail across the guitar strings, needing a noise to fill the silence but wanting above anything to hear the cheery sound of his brother’s teasing banter. He was hungry but he didn’t want to return to that unnaturally empty kitchen.
He was still sitting on the bed when he heard the front door open and close and his father’s footsteps in the hall. He listened – his father had definitely returned alone and he judged that he was now back in the kitchen.
Eight o’clock came and went. Hunger drove Zaki downstairs. It was growing dark in the house and the light was on in the kitchen, it streamed out through the door into the unlit hall. Zaki’s father was leaning over the kitchen table, his hands resting on either side of the spread-out plans, his head hung down between his raised shoulders. Zaki stood in the doorway