The Messengers Read online

  “I do performances and workshops here in my spare time. I teach painting and sometimes play some songs. It’s a good arrangement, because — as you can imagine — I have to come here quite a lot, as a messenger.”

  I shook my head. “It’s sick.”

  “I’ve got to deliver the messages. At least this way, I’m giving something back,” he said, tapping the guitar case.

  “Yeah, you’re a real hero. A real guardian of the community. Don’t the staff wonder about the fact that every time you turn up, someone dies?”

  “It’s a nursing home. People die all the time.” Peter cleared his throat as we approached the entrance. “Do you have the drawing?” he said.

  I shuddered, thinking of the old man lying dead in the bath. “Yes,” I said.

  Peter rang the doorbell.

  “But it’s been such a nice day,” I said stupidly.

  “That’s what we do,” said Peter. “We ruin people’s days.”

  “You do a lot more than that,” I said.

  A young woman opened the door. One of the staff. “Peter!” she said. She turned round and shouted back into the next room, where the old folks sat about on brown armchairs. “Everyone, Peter’s here!” She said it as if they should be over the moon.

  He played a sort of lame country-and-western music, which the oldies loved. They clapped their hands as he sang. I watched him and listened to his fake American accent. The drawing I’d folded into my pocket seemed to be burning a hole through my jeans. I scanned the faces of the old people, and I saw the man from the drawing sitting at the back, grinning with his big white teeth. I thought, strangely, of the windup dentures in Max’s room. My stomach did the Big Dipper.

  The old folk joined in with the chorus:

  “I’m the messenger of love, girl,

  And these words I bring to you.

  The messenger of love, girl,

  But I’m feeling kind of blue.

  I’m the messenger of love, girl,

  And I need to let you know:

  I’ve searched so hard to find you,

  Now I got to let you go.”

  After the song, the audience broke up. Some of them went to watch TV, while some stayed behind to talk to Peter. The women seemed particularly pleased to see him, especially a woman with big earrings called Jane. I stayed back, not wanting to get involved.

  “And who’s that with you?” asked Jane, pointing to me.

  “That’s Frances. She’s my apprentice. Soon enough, she’ll be visiting care homes on her own.”

  I nodded and tried to smile, but I was struggling to keep control of my breathing. I tried to think of Maxi’s kendo meditation. The man from my drawing was staring out the window.

  “Do you do music?” Jane asked me. I shook my head.

  “No,” said Peter, smiling. “Frances has a talent for drawing. She’ll be doing workshops.”

  Jane laughed and nudged one of her friends. “Ooooh, is it with those nude models?” she said. “What’s it called now? Life drawing! Does she do life drawing?”

  “The opposite, really,” Peter said.

  I frowned at him, disgusted.

  “What do you mean?” Jane said.

  “Landscapes. She does mainly landscapes. Excuse me, ladies,” he said, and beckoned me to follow him to where the old man was looking out onto the lawn. I stood shakily and made my way over.

  “I’m so sorry, chap, I’ve forgotten your name,” Peter said, sitting down.

  “Don’t worry, pal,” the old man said, winking at me. “Everyone here is forgetful. I wonder what it is about the place. My name’s Tom. Tom Kingston.”

  “You walk down by the seafront sometimes, don’t you?”

  “I do,” said Tom. “Bit of sea air does you good.” He leaned forward. “I really only do it so my daughter can get some exercise. Between you and me, she’s got a big behind. But she just sits outside that coffee place and eats cake!”

  Peter laughed. I fished the drawing from my pocket. I wanted to get it over with. The last thing I needed was get to know the bloke. Peter put his hand on my arm to stop me.

  “I hope you don’t mind, Tom, but Frances and I brought along this catalog from one of the seafront exhibitions. It’s a free gallery, and we thought you might like to visit one day, didn’t we, Frances?”

  I managed to nod.

  Peter passed the catalog to me and kept talking to Tom. I was in a daze and it took me a moment to understand what I was supposed to do. I slipped the folded drawing into the catalog and thrust it toward Tom.

  “Here,” I said.

  “Oh,” said Tom. “Right. I don’t really need a brochure, to be honest. I can just mosey on down and —”

  “Take it,” I said, a little abruptly. I softened my voice. “There’s some nice pictures in the catalog.”

  “OK,” he said. “Ta.”

  He flicked through and came to the piece of paper on which I’d drawn his death. “What’s this? Oh — you’re into that modern art, are you?” he said. He turned the sketch upside down. “It’s all just shapes to me. I can’t make head nor tail of it. Never have been able to. Now these sea views, that’s more my style. . . .” He slipped the piece of paper back into the catalog and continued reading. “I’ll take this upstairs, if I may,” he said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must do my ablutions before the ladies use up all the hot water.”

  Peter helped him stand and get his canes, and then Tom Kingston crept down the corridor with his four-step rhythm, the brochure clasped between his elbow and his body. I felt Peter’s hand cover mine, and I had to hold back the tears.

  One of the old ladies, seeing how distressed I looked, got me a cup of tea, and they crowded around me, asking what was wrong, but I couldn’t speak.

  “She’s all right,” Peter said. “She’s had a tough day, that’s all.”

  Part of me wanted to punch him, but the other part — the bigger part — wanted to lean against his strong shoulder. So I did.

  “This is how I was in the beginning,” he whispered.

  After a while, a noise like a dinosaur came from the ceiling, a screeching and rumbling that made the walls quake. “What’s that?” Peter said.

  “It’s the old Victorian water pipes,” Jane said.

  Tom Kingston was running his final bath.

  We left before they found him.

  On the bus home, I didn’t really want to talk about what had happened at the care home, but I knew that when I got back to Auntie Lizzie’s, I wouldn’t be able to.

  “He was a nice man,” I said. “Why did he have to be such a nice man?”

  “They’re the easiest. The toughest ones are the bad people,” Peter said.

  “What?” I said. “How can you possibly say that?”

  “It’s worse, believe me. When they’re bad, there’s a part of you that wants to do it, and that’s hard to live with. Eventually, you’ll stop feeling anything and things will get better.”

  “Why do you think it’s better not to feel?” I said. “Feeling stuff is important. It makes you want to change the situation. I don’t want to be someone with no emotions.”

  I was trying to provoke him, but he just shrugged and looked out to sea. I thought about the future. If I was only going to draw people I had seen, then maybe I should hang around in prisons, with the pedos and murderers. But then I thought of Johnny. He could be in prison soon. I’d neglected Johnny recently. All the stuff with Peter had taken over my life.

  From the bus window, I looked back at the windmill. I thought of the little plastic beach windmills I’d seen on the pier.

  We passed a road sign. HARTSLEIGH 15 MILES.

  “If you could control your gift, would you see your son?” I said.

  “I don’t believe it can be controlled. Tabby knew so much about the folklore and history of the messengers. She didn’t think there was any way round it. She told me it was probably dangerous to even try,” Peter said.

  “And
you just believed her?” I said.

  “She was like a parent to me.”

  “And you never questioned your parents?”

  “Look, it’s too risky. I believe that death is bigger than us. It’s a force we can’t underst —”

  “Oh, whatever,” I said. “I’m sick of this moping, mystic rubbish.”

  I was fed up. I hate it when people won’t try to help themselves. But when I looked at Peter again, he was almost crying. I realized he’d been trying to tell me about his mentor — about his feelings for her — but I hadn’t really been listening.

  “How did Tabby die?” I said.

  “I killed her,” he said instantly. He regained his composure. His face became unreadable again. He’d learned to bury his emotions. He’d had to.

  “You painted her?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you delivered the message? I thought you said she was everything to you.”

  “She was. I didn’t deliver the message.”

  “So how come she died?”

  He closed his eyes. “Tabby called it the double bind. She’d told me about it, you see. I think she knew it was coming. Sometimes you draw a person you love. If you deliver the message, they die. If you don’t, they die anyway, because you didn’t deliver the message. That’s the double bind.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “She told me about it, but I didn’t believe her. When I painted her, I burned the message. But it still came to pass. That’s why I feel like I don’t have much choice about the way things turn out.”

  We didn’t speak for the rest of the journey.

  His gift to me, when I left the bus, was a stack of blank postcards. “For your next messages. Makes things simpler,” he said. When I took them, I was accepting what I had become: a messenger.

  Back at the house, I survived Uncle Robert’s cheerful questions about my day, and I survived Auntie Lizzie’s kindness and concern. They’d saved some food, which I ate in the kitchen, but my mind kept drifting to Tom Kingston with his sticks, walking down the hallway at Windmill View.

  I went to my room as soon as I could. I knew Johnny would have helped. I’d have been able to tell him about being a messenger, and he’d have taken it seriously. I pulled back the curtains and whispered out onto the dusty blue streets: “Where are you?”

  I hoped he wasn’t living rough. God, I wanted him back, even if it meant he might end up in jail. I knew that was selfish, though. Maybe he’d be better off running away completely, taking a plane to South America or someplace. Sometimes, when I closed my eyes, I saw the policeman in intensive care. Other times, the face behind the breathing equipment was Johnny’s.

  There was no point sitting there wallowing. I remembered a girl I knew at school, from my art class, whose dad was a lawyer. I took out my mobile and called. She answered, sounding the same as always, half-really-interested but half-doing-something-else. “Frances? Oh, hey! Not seen you for a while.”

  “I’ve been away for the summer. Listen, I’ve got this . . . this legal question. You probably know about my brother. . . .”

  “Your brother?” she said, and I waited for the penny to drop. It did. “Oh, yeah, right. Your brother.”

  “I just wondered if I might be able to ask your dad a quick question about his case.”

  She was quiet for a moment and then told me to hang on. She covered the phone with her hand, though I could still hear her whispering. “Yeah, the one who punched the policeman. . . . No, not really. She’s in my art class. . . . OK.”

  “Hi, Frances?” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s not in.”

  We exchanged quick good-byes and then I hung up. You can be the most determined person in the world. You can be a doer and a go-getter who powers through the obstacles of life and goes on about being in control of her own destiny. But sometimes you can look at your own family and think, This is a mess and I just don’t know how to clean it up.

  Later that night, my mind was still crackling, so I decided to give Maxi’s meditation another go. I sat on the end of the bed and closed my eyes, tensed each muscle and then released. I felt the warm tingle. A few minutes later, I heard a noise. It was the sound of the sea. That was impossible. Even if Uncle Robert hadn’t bought the best double-glazing in the world, I still shouldn’t have been able to hear the sea. It was miles away. But there it was, crashing and fizzing in my head.

  The waves started to wash all the other thoughts away: Tom Kingston, Pete and Rowenna playing guitar together, Johnny pounding the streets . . . All those images disappeared under the hissing of the water. The noise was like a silence.

  I don’t know how long I sat there, but when I came round, I knew what I had to do. I was a messenger, but that didn’t mean I had to accept everything Peter said about it. You must deliver the message or your loved ones will suffer, he had said. But he hadn’t mentioned anything about what I could or couldn’t do after the message had been delivered.

  I thought back to the cubist paintings and what Peter had read from the information board. The cubist artist depicts the subject from many viewpoints to represent it in greater context. That’s what a death was: it was a context with many viewpoints. It was a coming together of lots of different elements. But what if I could change one of those elements? What if I could mess around with the context? “Remove anything hazardous,” Maxi had said.

  I took the postcard of Kelly the Hen out of my rucksack and went to Uncle Robert’s study. Everyone had gone to bed; the house was quiet. I fired up the computer, plugged in the scanner, and scanned the postcard. The program told me the image wasn’t recognized, but it came up fine on the monitor. The screen was a twenty-four-incher, so I had a good view of Peter’s painting. The detail was incredible, especially considering that the postcard was so small.

  I zoomed in on the stretcher by the ambulance. I could see Kelly’s nose, some blood around it, and a fluorescent green liquid staining her cheek. I could see the veins in her arm. I zoomed in on the faces of the people surrounding the ambulance. Everyone was in fancy dress. There were a few of Kelly’s cowgirl friends and a big hefty bloke dressed as a schoolgirl, who looked very worried. The detail of the painting was so sharp, I could see the clumps of his mascara.

  The cause of Kelly’s death was unclear. Had she fallen? Was it drink or drugs? Maybe she just had a heart attack, and what was I supposed to do about that? Well, I couldn’t do anything until I’d figured out where she was. I scrolled around the painting, looking for clues. The ambulance was parked outside a bar called the Pink Barracuda. I scribbled the name onto a Post-it. At the top of the road, in the background, was a clock tower. Surely, I thought, there was no way he could get that sort of detail. But then I remembered the loupe he wore over his eye when he was checking the postcards for clues. I zoomed in. Amazing. I could see both clock hands with perfect clarity. A quarter to three. I looked at the clock in the corner of the computer screen. It was 1:34. No time to hang around. I got out my kit bag and took some of the cash that Mum had given me.

  I stopped when I got to Max’s room. I always gave the impression I was a tough girl, but for this mission I wanted company.

  His hand rose to his face when I hit the light switch, but somehow he kept on sleeping. His toe was sticking out of the covers, so I pinched it. “What the bloody hell — ?” he said. He reached out for his glasses and put them on. “You again. Cousin, this is a bad habit, you waking me up. It’s not going to deepen our friendship.”

  “Fancy a beer?” I said.

  “Are you crazy? No. I’m in training. What I eat and drink is training. When I sleep, it’s training.”

  “How about some drugs?” I said.

  “Go to bed,” he said.

  “I need to go into town. It’s really important.”

  “How important?”

  I realized what he was after. Money for his kendo kit. “It’s probably worth a face mask,” I said.

  “They�
�re three hundred pounds,” he said.

  “It’s worth ten percent of a face mask.”

  “Fifteen percent.”

  “Done,” I said, taking out my fold of notes and peeling a few off. Maxi slapped his forehead when he saw how much cash I had.

  “You should have asked for twenty-five percent,” I said.

  “We’ll have to be quiet,” Maxi said, climbing out of his bed. He had a bit of a tent in his shorts, and he didn’t quite turn away in time.

  “Lordy, Max! You’ll make me blush!” I said.

  I won’t repeat what he said in reply, but it wasn’t up to his usual standard of good manners.

  Helmstown was a big, beautiful mess. A blur of bright lights and bright clothes and bare flesh. There was some sort of football tournament that summer, and people had been drinking all day. Everything was red and white and flashing — even the people. “Where’s the clock tower?” I said.

  Maxi, who was used to hanging around in dark bedrooms and on dark seafronts, turned his nose up. “You don’t want to go there.”

  “I have to,” I said.

  “It’s like the end of the world.”

  “I don’t care.”

  He shook his head and pointed the way. “What’s this all about, anyway?” he said.

  “Nothing. It’s no big deal. I met this woman today. We got on well, and she invited me out with her friends.”

  “No big deal,” Maxi said. “You dragged me out of bed and it’s no big deal.”

  “Look. There’ll be at least ten women there, and they will all be up for it. Honestly, you should be grateful.”

  Great Western Street ran from the clock tower down to the seafront, and it was stag and hen night central. “The end of the world,” Maxi had said.

  “They’re just having . . . fun,” I said, watching a man dressed as Fred Flintstone puke into a drain.

  We marched down to the Pink Barracuda. The doorman eyed us suspiciously. Maybe because we were underage or maybe because we weren’t dressed like we’d covered ourselves in wallpaper paste and run through the thrift store. But he let us in.

  The bar was rammed, and I struggled through the crowds to where Kelly and her gang were drinking tequila shots, still wearing their cowboy hats. Kelly had three shots in front of her.