The Messengers Read online

  “There they are!” I shouted in Maxi’s ear.

  “Those women? And you thought my friends were bad.”

  “Your friends don’t wear enough cowboy gear.”

  “This place is revolting,” he said.

  “Don’t be such a mard-arse,” I said.

  I intentionally bumped into Kelly from behind and then apologized. “’S OK,” she said. I stared into her eyes. She was already very drunk. I didn’t know exactly how she was going to die, but I was beginning to lean toward alcohol as a cause. I remembered the green liquid on her face in the message. She frowned at me.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Haven’t I seen you before?” she said.

  “Don’t think so,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t remember me slapping the postcards out of her hand. “Is it your hen night?”

  “Yup,” she said, swaying slightly. “I’m getting married next week.”

  “How romantic,” I said. “What’s his name?”

  “Steve,” she said, slurring the word slightly so it sounded like sleeve. “We were destined to be together.”

  “How did he propose?”

  “On the London Eye. Thirty-first of December.”

  “New Year’s Steve!” I said.

  She screamed with laughter. “You’re funny, you are,” she said. “Here, have a shot. I don’t think I can manage all three.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I picked one of the tequilas up and knocked the other two over with my elbow.

  “Oh, sorry,” I said.

  While she was staring at the mess, I tipped the third one on the floor. I needed to be sober. A couple of the other women looked daggers at me.

  “Sorry,” I said again. “Kelly, let me get you another drink. Come with me to the bar.”

  “Erm, who are you again?” she said.

  “Frances!” I said, as if I was really offended that she’d forgotten.

  “And you’re going to buy me a drink?”

  “Of course.”

  She looked confused for a moment, but then she shrugged. “OK,” she said.

  I turned around to introduce her to Max, but he was doing the lasso dance with one of the other cowgirls. She was a bit younger and prettier than the others, and she looked like a pixie. I laughed and Kelly laughed too. I looked at my watch. It was 2:15 a.m. Unless I could do something about it, Kelly had thirty minutes to live.

  At the bar, I tried to let as many people go before me as I could, to give Kelly time to sober up. She was rocking on her feet and kept bumping into me. She wasn’t a small woman, and I wondered if I’d be able to carry her out if it came to that. She kept looking back at the other girls, who had started to mingle with a group of rugby lads in drag. I recognized the one dressed as a schoolgirl from the painting. My heart jumped. “What do you want to drink, Kelly?” I said. “How about a water? It’s good to hydrate your skin before the wedding.”

  “Water? No, thanks. I . . . I . . . I’m here to . . . enjoy meself. I’ll have a woman pope . . . I mean . . . a rum and Coke.”

  It could have been worse — the bar had an offer on absinthe. I bought a couple of Cokes without rum. She took a big gulp but didn’t notice the lack of alcohol. I started asking her questions about the wedding dress and her family and the bridesmaids. It seemed to help her concentrate. The problem was, as she sobered up, she started to wonder why she was talking to a girl she didn’t know. She began to look around, frowning.

  Then, before I knew what was happening, we were surrounded by cowgirls and rugby players. “Kel, Kel, Kel!” one of the older women said. “We’ve got another dare for you.” The other girls whooped. “You’ve got to get your boobs out for one of these men!”

  The big guy from the painting was laughing, his pigtails flung back. “Yeah,” he said. “Come on.”

  She won’t do it, I thought. But she did. It was only for a second, but cheers and screams went up. Poor old Steve, I thought. Getting your boobs out was obviously a decent way to meet men, because pretty soon Mr. Schoolgirl was whispering in her ear. I tried to go over and speak to her, but the other girls blocked me off. “Let her have a bit of fun,” one of them said.

  “Yeah,” said another one. “What’s it got to do with you? Who are you, anyway?”

  One of the rugby lads put his thick sweaty hand on my waist. “Where are your cowboy boots, darling?” he said.

  “I’m wearing trainers, and you’ll have one of them embedded in your shinbone if you don’t get your hands off me,” I said.

  “Oh, come on,” he said.

  I sidestepped him, but I couldn’t see Kelly anymore, and we were running out of time. I spun round, looking for a cowboy hat, but there were too many of them. I started to panic. A word came into my head, spoken in Peter’s voice. That word was inevitable.

  Eventually I spied Kelly at the edge of the dance floor, near Max and the pixie girl. Mr. Schoolgirl was standing next to her, holding two plastic test tubes of liquid. It was absinthe. And it was green. I knew that the absinthe would tip her over the edge. Kelly was shaking her head, saying no, but Mr. Schoolgirl was reasoning with her. She leaned against him, hardly able to stand up by herself. I tried to push toward them, but the place was too crowded. It felt like there were hands all over me. Kelly took the test tube, and I flashed back to the painting. The green stains on her face. “Kelly!” I shouted, but the music was so loud I could barely hear my own voice.

  And then this happened: Mr. Schoolgirl shouted something to the pixie girl. She smiled. Max was smiling, too, and then, all of a sudden, he wasn’t. Mr. Schoolgirl had grabbed the pixie’s behind. I hardly saw what Maxi did, he was so fast. But suddenly, Mr. Schoolgirl was on the floor, and there was green drink everywhere.

  A few screams rang out over the music, and the crowd moved away from the center of the scene. I struggled over. Max had his knee in the big guy’s back and his pigtails in his hand. The wig came off and the big bloke’s head smacked the floor.

  “Max!” I shouted. “You OK?”

  He looked up at me, almost surprised by what had happened, as if he’d done it without thinking. “Yeah. A damn sight better than this guy, anyway.”

  “Ow, get off!” the big bloke screamed, and I told him to shut it. Words were had, and a few seconds later, two bouncers were dragging everyone outside.

  The sea air was very welcome. One of the bouncers started pushing Maxi around, and I went over. “Look at the size of him compared to you,” I said. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  The bouncer left Maxi and moved on to help his colleague, who was roughing up Mr. Schoolgirl. Maxi smiled at me.

  “Having a good night?” I said.

  “Not too bad,” Max said. “It’s like training. Sort of.”

  He spotted the pixie girl, and they started talking again, away from the crowd.

  Kelly was confused. She looked down at her white shirt, which now had a green bib of absinthe. It looked like none of the liquid had made its way into her mouth. In the quiet of the street, I could hear the world again. Little beeps went off, a few seconds apart. Hour alarms. I looked at my watch, and then up at the clock tower at the top of the road.

  Three a.m.

  “Yes!” I shouted. “I did it! We did it!”

  I grabbed Kelly and hugged her tight. “You’re OK, Kelly! You’re going to make it.”

  Kelly was weeping. Drunk. The drunk weeping phase. “Me blouse,” she said. “It’s bloody ruined.”

  I stroked her arm, felt her living flesh against my fingers. “Cheer up, Kelly,” I said. “Could have been worse.”

  Max and me crashed in the living room that night, each on our own massive sofa. Cheese and piccalilli sandwiches, cups of tea. “I can see the future, Maxi,” I said.

  “So can I. You’re going to spill your tea. And then we’re going to get a roasting from Mum.”

  “No, I’m serious. I can actually see the future. And I can change it.”

  He asked what I had asked.
What anyone would ask. “What’s going to happen to me, then?”

  “I don’t ever want to see your future, Maximum,” I said.

  But now it didn’t matter if I did. I thought I’d worked it all out. I could still deliver the message, so my family would be safe, but I had found a way to cheat death. Peter had almost convinced me that the death of a recipient was inevitable, but I had fought against the way he accepted things. I was just angry that I hadn’t thought of it before I let Tom Kingston go for his bath.

  I lay back into the soft cushions and pondered what all of this could mean for me, and for Peter and his son. I thought of Peter’s face, red and then blue in the jellyfish room. I thought about his big arm around my waist in the retirement home, the way it made my heart beat faster to be pulled toward him.

  That night I dreamed of Nana’s house in Whiteslade, where I’d woken from my first blackout. I still didn’t know why that night kept sneaking into my mind. I dreamed that I was running away from Johnny, his face swollen and shiny after the fight. I ran through Nana’s living room, through the kitchen with its lino that stuck to my feet, out into the garden, over the stone wall, and toward the shed, with a blank sheet of paper flapping in my hand. Mum was shouting to me, and Johnny was too. “I’m OK,” he was saying. “Look. It’s only a few scratches. I’m going to be OK.”

  It wasn’t the worst nightmare I’d ever had. You might even say it was reassuring, what with Johnny telling me he would be fine. But Johnny had always lied to make people feel better. And there was this feeling in the dream, something at the edges of my mind. A feeling of something horrible coming.

  When I woke up, I remembered a conversation Johnny had had with one of them God squad people who knock on your door.

  The woman asked Johnny what he did for a living, and when he answered, she told him that boxing was a sin.

  “Oh, aye?” he’d said. “How come?”

  “The Bible says, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’”

  “What if you wake up one morning and all you want them to do is give you a beating?”

  The woman hadn’t known what to say, and Johnny had slowly closed the door, smiling.

  I’d been hiding round the corner, and it was a big moment for me. For all those years of boxing, I’d never thought that he’d actually wanted to be hit.

  I thought about it now, and I was scared for him.

  Me running away from Johnny. Johnny running away from everyone. I hoped it wouldn’t be like this forever.

  Until I saved Kelly the Hen, I hadn’t realized how much becoming a messenger had changed me. So much of my life before had been about looking at things. I loved to sketch, to watch movies, to watch people. I always won staring contests. But now I avoided eye contact because I was afraid people might seep into my messages. I’d started to look at the ground, like a geisha. When you’re a messenger, looks can kill.

  But now that I’d saved Kelly, a fragile bit of hope came back to me. On my way to Peter’s hut the next morning, I was able — tentatively — to hold my head up again.

  He was waiting with tea from the Coffee Shack. “The new Peter Kennedy,” I said, sitting down. “His chest is covered, and there’s no plaster on his jeans.”

  “Frances! Always a pleasure. And that was almost a compliment. You seem to be feeling better than when we left Windmill View,” he said.

  My head dropped. I wasn’t ready for the reminder.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “That was insensitive. I forget, sometimes, what it’s like at the beginning. Things’ll get easier.”

  “I know,” I said, and he seemed puzzled by my sudden brightness. I wanted to keep my secret for a little bit longer, so I changed the subject. “Hey, where do you live when you’re not at the beach hut?”

  “Little flat in town.”

  “What happened to the place you lived in with Rowenna?”

  He sighed. “I gave it to her. I made sure the paperwork was in order. I didn’t want them to be homeless. I send child support money. I just don’t give a return address. . . .” He trailed off.

  “So you moved out and got a new place.”

  “It was a while before I bought the flat.”

  “What happened after you moved out?”

  “What’s this — twenty questions?” he snapped. But then he sighed and sat down on his chair. “I lost my mind a bit,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I couldn’t take it. The situation. Being a messenger had ruined my chance of happiness with Ro. It had ruined my life. I was frightened that if I could remember Rowenna’s face, it might end up in one of my paintings. I’d already killed Tabby, and I couldn’t risk it happening again. I tried to wipe Rowenna out of my memory.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I drank. I stayed in a bed-and-breakfast for a while, but they soon kicked me out. Half of the time I was drunk; the other half I was trying to track people down and deliver the messages so that Rowenna and my son would be safe.”

  “Sounds dark,” I said.

  “To say the least. So, it was obvious what would happen.”

  “What?”

  “I ended up in an institution.”

  “You went insane?” I said.

  “That’s not a word I like. I was sick — that’s all. Really sick. Of course, nobody there was bothered that I was banging on about how I was a messenger and I could paint death. Everyone was saying something like that, in there. They just gave me more pills.”

  “How did you get better?”

  “The medicine numbed my feelings and made me forget. Eventually Rowenna’s face faded from my memory.”

  He stopped for a moment and took a long breath before continuing. “And so she was safe,” he said, and smiled. “Which was good.”

  “I suppose. Not exactly ideal, though, is it?”

  “Nothing about being a messenger is ideal, Frances. It changes you. There is death everywhere. And it can be painful. If you get too close to people, you can destroy them, and yourself.”

  I looked over his desk: the phone books and the jeweler’s loupe glinting in the sun coming through the crack in the door. “I think I might have found a way to change all that,” I said.

  And I told him the story of how I’d saved Kelly the Hen.

  “You did what?” he said.

  “I stopped it from happening. Well, Max stopped it, really, but —”

  Peter smashed his fist into the desk, and I jumped.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I said.

  “Don’t you see what you’ve done? This could be a disaster. You don’t know what you’re dealing with. This is unknown territory! Every piece of knowledge that has been passed down points to the fact that death has an order.”

  “Oh, garbage,” I said.

  “It’s a stupid risk. We have to stick to what little we know. We have to play it safe. If Tabby taught me one thing, it’s that you can mess with life all you want, but you cannot mess with death.”

  “Doctors do it all the time,” I said.

  “No! You don’t know that.” He was on his feet now. “What if, when a doctor supposedly saves someone, it’s because that person wasn’t ready to die? That’s what I believe. That’s what I’ve learned from being a messenger: death is mapped out. You can’t reason with it, and you can’t stop it. It’s a force of nature, and it takes whatever is in its way.”

  “That’s a cop-out, Peter. That’s just an excuse to sit back and do nothing. People can make a difference in the world. People can change things. We have a choice.”

  “Who the hell are you to imagine that you have any control over life and death?” Peter said.

  “Well, I obviously do, because I saved Kelly.”

  “And at what price? At what price? Eh?” He crouched down to me, shouting in my face, and I wondered if he was losing it. After all, he just told me he’d spent time in an institution. “Do you have any idea about the consequences of what you’v
e done?” he said.

  “No. Do you?” I said.

  “That’s . . . I . . .”

  “You don’t, do you?”

  “I . . . Tabby warned me about this. She said it was the unbreakable rule.”

  “And you’re saying you never tried it? Not once?”

  “Of course I didn’t! Tabby made it perfectly clear that —”

  “Who was Tabby, anyway? What made her such an authority on everything?”

  “Don’t you dare doubt her! Besides, the stakes are too high to mess about. You can’t just try things. My family —”

  “But you showed Kelly the postcard,” I said. “You delivered the message. By your logic, nothing will happen to your family.”

  “What about yours?” he said. “You have put the people you love in terrible jeopardy.”

  For some reason, that made me snap. “The people I love are already in jeopardy! I’ve got a nervous wreck of a mum who won’t even talk to me. The bloody police are hunting down my brother like an animal. And God only knows where my dad is. As for me, if I have to spend the rest of my life as a murderer, then I’d rather be dead.”

  Peter looked shocked. Good, I thought. I marched out of his hut and slammed the door.

  That night, I sat with Auntie Lizzie in the living room. On the TV, detectives were gathered at crime scenes where the murders had already happened. Maybe, I thought, I didn’t need Peter. What good had he done me so far? I tried to convince myself I could get through it all on my own.

  At about nine p.m., I started to feel tired. It seemed like the furniture was suddenly too big, as if the sofa might swallow me up. So I said good night to Auntie Lizzie and went upstairs. I began to feel woozy before I got to the top, and I blacked out on the landing. The next few minutes were oblivion, and when I woke up in the trancelike state, I pulled a postcard and a pencil from my rucksack, and I drew the message there and then.

  I must have fallen asleep on the landing, because Uncle Robert found me at around eleven p.m., huddled over the postcard.

  “Frances?” he whispered. “Are you OK?”