The Messengers

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Acknowledgments

  We’re drawn to each other, us messengers. We must be. I remember the first time I saw him, down by the beach huts. There was something about him. The look of him. How could I not go over?

  You might even say it was fate, but I don’t believe in that.

  I’d been sent to Helmstown for a little break. Back home, there’d been all sorts of trouble. My brother, Johnny, had punched an off-duty policeman during a pub brawl, and the guy was in intensive care. A few days later, some shady characters had thrown a brick through the window of our flat. Johnny, scared about what the police might do to him, was on the run. Mum had gone to stay with her boyfriend (who I don’t like), so she’d given me some cash and sent me down to the coast to stay with my aunt and uncle and my cousin, Max. It was the summer holidays.

  My name is Frances, but they called me “Fraaaancers” in Helmstown, because of the accent. It was like a different name, and Helmstown was like a different world.

  So there we were, me and Max, walking the path above the seawall as the night came down. The day had been muggy, but the wind was fresh now, and when it came off the sea, you felt like you’d been slapped. The beach huts were on our left, and almost all of them were dark and padlocked. They looked like cold little men in hats.

  “Where are these mates of yours, then, Maxi?”

  “By the Coffee Shack probably,” he said.

  The Coffee Shack! Back home, we didn’t meet our friends for coffee after dark.

  Max was a year younger than me, and the last time I’d seen him, he’d been a chubby little boy in shorts who collected beetles and watched cartoons. He’d had a growth spurt since then. Now he swished his hair to one side and wore geek-chic thick-rimmed glasses with thin lenses and low-rise skinny jeans with the bum hanging down. He carried a skateboard. It was nice: I’d turned up expecting a little squirt to hang out with, and I’d found a proper friend. Maybe.

  Farther up the path, I could see that one of the beach huts was lit from the inside. Lamplight spilled out beyond the open red door.

  “So, what did the doctor say about your fainting? You’re hardly a delicate flower, Frances,” Max said.

  “He said it was your mum’s cooking,” I said.

  It wasn’t. Auntie Lizzie’s a great cook. The truth was I’d been having these funny turns for a while. The Helmstown doctor was as clueless as the doctors back home. It was a mystery. Basically, every now and then I had a blackout.

  What the doctors didn’t know — because I never told anyone — was that when I woke up, in a daze, I started drawing.

  I liked to draw in normal life. I kept a little sketch pad and a tin of Berol Venus green cracked-varnish pencils. In normal life, I drew what I’d been taught to draw: bowls of fruit, a knackered trainer, a collection of glass bottles. Typical art class stuff.

  But the drawings I did after these blackouts were different. Usually they were just a jumble of geometric shapes or swirls. They were crazy, more like the slides our art teacher showed us of the paintings of Pablo Picasso and his mates. Except my drawings made less sense. In fact, until that morning at Auntie Lizzie’s, the drawings had never made any sense. Until then, they’d just been random scribbles, incomplete pictures. Of course, the reason I never told anyone about the drawings was because I didn’t fancy being locked away in a mental institution.

  Recently the blackouts had started to get more regular. They used to happen about once a year, but now it was more like once a month. The doctors thought it was to do with my period. They thought I was anemic.

  Anyway, I’d blacked out in my auntie’s kitchen that morning. The usual: tiredness, a smell of smoke, colors going weak, and then the world closing in from the sides. I fell off my chair, which probably looked quite dramatic. Auntie Lizzie took me up to my room, and — when she’d gone — I did my drawing, still in a strange sort of trance.

  But this time, the drawing made sense. The sketch contained people, buildings. It was a street scene. A place I recognized. The clarity of the image was amazing. It was still my style, but way more sophisticated. Like a photograph, almost. And what the drawing showed . . . well, I didn’t want to think about it.

  As we got closer to the open beach hut, a man stepped out, long and lean. His face was calm as he smoked. His jaw was strong, the lips thick as they blew. He wore dusty, sand-colored workman’s boots, jeans with paint stains, and a tracksuit top with the sleeves rolled up. His hair was blond and cut tight to his head. He was oldish; late twenties. The unusual thing about him was that he had a small magnifying glass above his right eye — the kind jewelers use to study diamonds — with a strap around his head to keep it in place.

  I couldn’t stop looking at him. It’s difficult to explain why, to separate all the feelings. Thinking back, perhaps I recognized something in him. There was an attraction, too, although I might not have admitted it at the time. His body seemed to be wound tight with power, and I found myself staring at the wiry muscles in his lower arm. He took a draw on his cigarette and adjusted the magnifying glass on his forehead. Then he nodded to me as we passed, like he knew me, as if he were thinking the same things I was.

  I looked back and took in the interior of the beach hut behind him, lit up by a big desk lamp. I could only see a fragment from that angle, but there were paints and brushes in cups, and daubs of color everywhere. We walked on, me and Max. My heart beat fast, but I tried to laugh it off. “Did you see that guy?” I said. “What did he have on his head?”

  “No idea,” Max said. “He sells postcards, I think.”

  “You know him?”

  Max looked at me, surprised by the questions. “No,” he said. “I’ve just seen him around.”

  I shot one last glance over my shoulder, but the man had gone back into the hut, and his fag end was rolling on the concrete of the path, the tip like a hot grain of sand.

  It was almost completely dark when we saw the group of boys huddled by the light of the Coffee Shack, a small building with a serving hatch that backed onto the beach. A man was walking away from the Shack with a coffee in one hand and a slim dog held on a lead in the other. The boys behind him had skateboards. One of their phones glowed white.

  “Are they your friends?”

  “Yeah,” Max said.

  Suddenly I didn’t feel like being in a crowd. “I think I’m going to head back to the house, Maxi,” I said.

  “They’re not that bad,” Max said with a grin.

  “It’s not that. I’m just a bit tired, you know.”

  “Be careful,” he said.

  “You southerners are all soft.”

  Max laughed. He put down his board and rode toward his mates, and I went the other way.

  I knew where I was going, and it wasn’t back to the house.

  The door of the hut was still open, but he was bent over his work now, the magnifying glass pulled down over one eye. I stood back from the entrance for a moment and took in the tiny heater and the round mirror that reflected the sea, the swaying masts of
the boats by the beach, and the dark shape of me. There was a postcard rack behind his chair and a hand-painted postcard on his desk, but he wasn’t painting. He was studying it. From the angle I was at, I couldn’t see the detail.

  He must have noticed my shadow because he looked up, his free eye still closed. I imagined how I must have seemed to him through the magnifying glass: warped and blurred and massive.

  “You’re back,” he said. He had a faded accent. Scottish or Irish. “I thought you might be.”

  “Did you?” I said. “Maybe in your mind, this kind of hovel is a girl magnet.” I tended to lash out a bit when nervous.

  He shrugged and I was surprised to see that I’d upset him. He turned back to the postcard and muttered something.

  “Anyway, I was just passing and I saw your postcards,” I said. That was a lie, and the look on his face told me that he knew as much. “Do you paint them?”

  “Some of them.”

  “Can I buy one to send to my mum?”

  “Sure. Anything on the rack is fifty p.”

  Without stepping into the hut, I eyed the postcards on the rack. They were just the usual rubbish. Seafront scenes, beach huts, pictures of Princess Di, cartoons of vicars ogling women with big boobs.

  “I wanted one of the hand-painted ones.”

  He sighed and took off the magnifying glass. “I don’t think you do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It doesn’t matter. We’ll get to that later.”

  His manner was businesslike, as if it was just inevitable that our conversation would continue.

  “Who said anything about later.” I stepped away from the door and looked down the path, but there was nobody about. The sea fizzed as it dragged over the stones. I stared out on the endless darkness. You didn’t get that sort of dark stretch back home.

  “I’ve seen you around,” he said.

  “I doubt it. I’ve only been here a week.”

  “Please yourself.”

  “I generally do. What, you think you’re a mystic? Some sort of fortune-teller?”

  “I’m not a mystic,” he said.

  “Not in that tracksuit top, you’re not. Is that supposed to be retro?”

  He laughed. “No. I probably bought it the first time it was fashionable. I just wear it to work in. It helps me to create a distance from what I have to do. It’s why I come here. Different place, different clothes. It’s not the kind of work you want to take home with you.”

  “It all sounds a bit serious for selling postcards.”

  “I’m talking about my real work.”

  There was a look about him when he said that — somewhere between frightened and lethal.

  “What am I doing here?” I said under my breath.

  “You couldn’t help it.”

  He stood up out of his chair. He was long and tight as a guitar string. He turned over the postcard on his desk and wrote something on the back in pencil. “Do you really want to see one of the hand-painted postcards?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I said, glancing at the card. “Not if you’ve written your number on it.”

  He smiled for a moment, then suddenly stopped. “I don’t need to. You’ll be back. Listen, you go past Friston Street, don’t you, on your way home? Will you post this for me? It’s very important.”

  “You’re not clever,” I said. “I’d have to walk past Friston Street to get anywhere.”

  “Fine. But will you deliver it?”

  He gave me the postcard. I didn’t look at it. “Why should I?” I said.

  “How are you feeling?” he said, ignoring my question. “After this morning? Eh? Drained, I bet. It drains you, doesn’t it?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You had an attack, didn’t you? This morning? A blackout. I can tell, because you’re just getting your color back. What did you draw afterward?”

  I shook my head and turned to go. “Bugger off, you freak,” I said.

  “My name’s Peter Kennedy,” he said. “Pete.”

  “Bugger off, Pete,” I said.

  I began to walk away, and then I turned back. He was standing in the doorway of the hut, the light spilling out around him. “I’m Frances Clayton,” I said. I don’t know what came over me.

  “OK,” he said, “I’ll probably speak to you tomorrow.”

  “What makes you think that?” I said.

  “You’ll need to talk,” he said, and pulled the door shut.

  Friston Street was long and quiet. The blossom petals had fallen to rot on the pavement, and the houses looked pale orange in the streetlight. I stopped beneath one of those streetlights and examined the postcard. I shuddered, but I didn’t know why.

  He was a talented painter; that much was clear. It was so lifelike, I had to check that the people in it weren’t moving. There was nothing particularly interesting about the subject of the postcard, but the detail — for something so small — was astonishing, and I knew now why he’d been using that little magnifying glass to study it. This was the scene:

  A street, with grand white houses on either side.

  The sea, at the end of the street.

  A thin woman carrying a big box across the road.

  A man looking out of the open second-floor window of one of the houses.

  A traffic warden studying a white van.

  A blue car, parked at a strange angle behind one of the nice black streetlamps they had on those old Helmstown roads.

  A weird, uncanny feeling came over me. I felt sick looking at the painting, but I figured that was what happened when you studied something so small. I’d had a long day.

  On the back of the postcard, there was no message, just a name and address, in Peter Kennedy’s surprisingly neat handwriting: Mr. Samuel Richard Newman, Flat 3, 14 Friston Street, Helmstown, HM4 4TN. Nothing else.

  Suddenly I wanted the thing out of my hands, so I ran up to the door of number 14, dropped it through the letterbox, and carried on down Friston Street, thinking of Peter Kennedy.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder and I spun round, gasping. It was Max.

  “Bloody hell, Maxi! Don’t creep up on people like that.”

  “I thought you’d gone home ages ago,” he said.

  “No, I . . . I just went for a bit of a stroll.”

  “Are you OK?” he asked. People kept asking me that, because of my blackouts and the mess back home. The truth was I felt like I was coping fine. But I didn’t know what was coming, did I?

  I couldn’t sleep that night. It wasn’t so much because of my strange meeting with the man in the beach hut or the drawing I’d done after my blackout — although I’d been so freaked out by the sketch, I’d buried it in my kit bag. Recently when I couldn’t sleep, it was because I didn’t know where my brother was.

  So, yes, he’d got into a stupid argument outside a pub and punched an off-duty policeman. Johnny was a boxer and that’s just the way he’d been rewired, through his training. Witnesses said the police officer was unconscious before he hit the ground, and because of this, he didn’t put his hands out to break his fall, so his head snapped back against the pavement. That’s what did the damage.

  The time it takes a professional boxer to throw a punch is one-tenth of a second. That’s how long you’ve got to get out of the way. That’s how long it takes to split two lives in half.

  Staying in Helmstown, along with this new development in my fainting fits, reminded me of the first time I’d seen Johnny fight. That was also the first time I blacked out. The junior championship bout was taking place at the Hilton Hotel on the Helmstown seafront, on a scalding hot day in August. I was five years old when me and Mum traveled down to watch. Too young, really, for something like that.

  Johnny was a youth boxing sensation, and our granddad had high hopes for him. He had a chin of steel, Granddad said. As a little girl, I had once stroked his face and said, “Your chin isn’t made of steel.”

  “It’s just a thi
ng folk say,” Johnny had answered. “It means I can take loads of punches.”

  “Why would you want to do that?” I’d said.

  Even before watching my first fight, I’d seen how our house changed in the days before one. It was all about trying to get Johnny’s weight down. He’d weigh himself twelve times before lunch. He’d ditch the steak-and-egg breakfasts he ate when he was training and the milk shakes that made his farts smell and were named after natural disasters: Cyclone, Whirlwind. He’d replace all that food with . . . nothing. Well, sometimes he’d chew a whole pack of Hubba Bubba and walk around the neighborhood, spitting, because he thought if he could get rid of all his spit, he’d drop a couple of pounds.

  Granddad would come and stay with us, and everyone would wake up early and play loud and ridiculous music. In the evenings, we would go to bed when it was still light, but Johnny wasn’t allowed to come to my room and tell me stories. I would wake to the sound of the bathroom scales whirring. I loved Johnny and I didn’t want there to be less of him.

  It was as if all of the pipes and cables in the house fed into and out of my brother. As we got nearer to the day of the fight, Mum would become tense and shout at me for nothing, but Johnny would tell me it was going to be OK. “I don’t worry about getting hit, Fran,” he said once. “The worst thing, for me, is having to take my top off in front of all those people.”

  There was a fashion, at that time, of giving boxers nicknames from retro films, and they decided to call him Johnny “Top Gun” Clayton.

  The seafront was packed on the day of that Helmstown fight. Not many Claytons had been to a Hilton, and me and Mum felt out of place. Auntie Lizzie hadn’t moved to Helmstown yet, and we were staying at Nana and Granddad’s funny little house, just down the coastal road in Whiteslade. So it was odd to walk through the posh, cool corridors of the Hilton and then into this rowdy, darkened ballroom that stank of sweat and cigarette smoke. They’d built a mini grandstand for the spectators to sit in. I remember how the backs of my thighs stuck to the blue folding seats and how the ring, which was so brightly lit, looked like a square swimming pool. I remember thinking that the announcer looked odd standing in the boxing ring in his suit and bow tie. And I remember Mum, with her hair dyed red and her white shirt, as still and straight as the lion statues outside big old buildings.