The Ant Colony Page 6

  “Who’s your three favourite people?” she said. “Mine’s my mum and Isabel and you.”

  I told her not to be ridiculous. I said she’d only met me once. I said, “I could be really horrible – you haven’t known me long enough to find out.”

  She said, “None of my friends are horrible.”

  I said I didn’t have any favourite people. I said I didn’t have any friends. I said I moved to London to get away from people, and she laughed and said, “That’s just dumb.”

  She said, “What about Max?”

  “OK, Max,” I said.

  “And Ringo?”

  “Not a person.”

  “Well pets count.”

  “OK.”

  “And me,” she said. “You can choose me. I chose you so it’s fair.”

  “OK,” I said. “Max and Ringo and Bohemia are my three favourite people.”

  “That’s better,” she said.

  She said, “Anyway, why would you move to such a crowded place if you wanted to be alone? I just don’t believe you.”

  I said I used to walk Ringo a lot on the common near to Max’s. We had to walk there and back on the road, which wasn’t so nice, but once you got there it was flat and high, right at the foot of the mountain.

  “It was full of rabbits,” I told Bohemia. “Ringo could knock himself out chasing those.”

  “What really?”

  “No, but he knocked me over once or twice.”

  I remember one of the farmer’s sons was herding wild ponies on his quad bike, driving them down the mountain before the snow came, helping them out. Everything was hazy, light shining through mist, like my eyes weren’t focusing properly, like someone hadn’t wiped the windscreen.

  Max was up there wearing his weird coat. You could spot him from any distance. It was an old fisherman’s jacket, bright yellow, ridiculous. It had pockets on the inside that Max had put there. He kept things in it – string, knives, magnifying glass, compass, specimen pots from the doctor. Max in that yellow coat was like a glow-in-the-dark field trip, a walking laboratory. He was certifiable.

  I waved and he turned away for a second to look behind him, like he was making sure I wasn’t waving at someone else. There was nobody else there in all that open space.

  When he got closer I saw he’d cut his hair again. His cheeks were raw pink with the cold. “Hello,” I said. “Been to the barber’s?”

  He touched it with the flat of a hand. It stuck up like clutches of wild grass. I wondered if it felt sharp. “How’s it going, Sam?” he said.

  I shrugged “OK. Bored. What are you doing?”

  “Nothing much.”

  I said, “You’ve got your crazy coat on, Max. You’ve got to be up to something.”

  “Yep,” he said, but he wasn’t telling me what it was.

  Ringo was chasing the quad bike, barking his head off. We both watched him, shielding our eyes from the sun.

  “Still chasing things that could kill him,” Max said.

  “Yep. Motorbikes, cars, tractors. He’s got a thing about being run over.”

  “Survival instinct,” Max said, and I couldn’t tell if he was joking. I never could.

  The bracken was knee high and there were winding paths through and in between, and you never quite ended up where you were headed. The dog came crashing back through the leaves like a fish jumping out of water. He ran right into the side of my legs because he’s an idiot, and he was over-excited and the plants were too high for him to see where he was going. I hit the floor and just lay there with him standing over my face.

  “Ouch,” Max said.

  “Stupid hound.”

  “Well, nice to see you,” he said, not really looking at me, rubbing the dog’s back with both hands.

  When I rolled over in the crumbling stink and got to my feet, the quad bike was gone. The ponies were moving slowly across the flat, necks down, eight of them together. I brushed broken leaves off my clothes and Max walked away through the bracken in his yellow coat, sending up plumes of plant dust in the light.

  “You must miss Max,” Bohemia said. “And Ringo.”

  I said, “I suppose I do.”

  “Lucky you’ve got me,” she said. “One out of three’s not bad.”

  I looked at her, smiling at me, her legs sticking out of my sweatshirt like the sticks I’ve thrown down the river all my life, big-kneed and bleached to bone by the sun. She seriously thought we were friends.

  Nine (Bohemia)

  When I came downstairs the morning of the power cut, Steve and Isabel were busying about. Steve was painting the wall in the hallway. I asked if I could help.

  Isabel said, “You can chuck the junk mail in the recycling. And when we’ve taken the carpet up, you can give it a good sweep with me.”

  I said, “Can Doormat stay out here with us?”

  “Course he can.”

  “Won’t he escape?”

  “No. He knows which side his bread is buttered.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I’ve been feeding him twice a day for twelve and a half years and he hasn’t had to do an ounce of work for it.”

  I sat in the doorway with all the letters, and the ones with names I didn’t know I threw in the bin. I heard Sam coming down the stairs.

  “What does that one say?” Isabel asked, pointing at one. Her finger was like a drawing of a stick. “Who’s the letter for?”

  “The Occupier.”

  “What about that one?” Isabel said, picking up another. She took it out of my hands. “Oh, that’s for you,” she said, and she held the envelope out to Sam.

  “Can’t be,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  Sam shrugged. “It just can’t.”

  “Sam Cassidy,” Isabel read. “That’s you, isn’t it?”

  Sam didn’t look very happy.

  “Come on,” Isabel said. “Take it and open it.”

  He shook his head.

  I stood up and took the letter out of Isabel’s hand.

  “It doesn’t say your name,” I said. “She’s teasing you. It says Sarah Chakrabati.” I looked at Isabel cos I knew what she was up to. “I can read, you know.”

  “Oh,” said Isabel, and you could tell she was lying. “I must have the wrong glasses on.”

  “You’re a good little reader,” Steve said.

  “Thanks.”

  I heard what Isabel said to Sam while Steve was talking. She said it quietly, but I heard it anyway. She said, “Nobody knows you’re here, do they.”

  Steve cleared his throat and picked his brush back out of the water.

  And I thought, That’s rubbish, because I do.

  Later, Mum brought me back a sandwich – a chicken and sweetcorn one – and even though I’d been thinking about being a vegetarian, I was glad cos it was after six by then and I would’ve eaten a horse with pickle.

  She sat down with me on the sofa bed. We hadn’t put it away since we moved in and I was trying not to get chicken and sweetcorn on the sheets. When I finished I stood up and brushed the crumbs off me on to the floor.

  “You still hungry?” Mum said.

  “A bit.”

  She asked me if I was happy and I said, “Course.”

  She lifted her arm and I sat back closer to her, right in against her side. It was nice. She had her hand on my hair and it pulled a little bit on my hair band, tweaked something sharp at my neck, but I didn’t say anything cos I didn’t want her to move.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t seen you all day,” she said, and she kissed the top of my head.

  “We cleaned the hallway,” I said. “Did you notice?”

  She said the lights were off when she came in. She said, “Maybe I smelled paint.”

  I told her I helped. “Good for you,” she said.

  She was quiet for a bit and then she got up and went to the loo. She was in there for ages. I kept talking to her to make sure she hadn’t fallen asleep.

>   “Sam lives by himself,” I said through the door.

  “Who?”

  “Sam. He works in a shop down the road. Maybe he could get you a job there.”

  There was a long wait before Mum said, “Maybe.”

  I didn’t tell her that nobody knew Sam was here. I didn’t think she’d want to know.

  When she came out she was wearing just her underwear and she was running a bath. Her bare feet made this sliding noise on the floor, like she was walking without picking them up. I got in the bath with her and she didn’t mind at all, and we lay there in the bubbles doing nothing. Afterwards she helped me build this sort of roof for the sofa bed out of a blanket hanging and a long piece of string. We tied one end of the string to the wall and one end to a nail in the door, and draped the blanket over it. When the door was shut it was perfect, but if you opened it everything collapsed. You could sit on the sofa bed like you were in a tent looking out.

  She got in the tent with me and we lay there looking out at the walls.

  I said, “Maybe we’ll go camping for real, in the summer, and build a big fire on the beach and eat fresh fish and marshmallows.”

  Mum used to love camping when she was a kid. She said, “You had to buy tokens for the shower and when the token ran out that was it. You’d have to go into the shop in your towel with soap everywhere and buy another one.”

  She said, “We didn’t eat fresh fish, we ate beans and sausages out of a can and everything had wet grass in it.”

  “Let’s go,” I said. “Do you promise?”

  She didn’t promise, but she did say she’d stay like that till I was asleep as long as I didn’t stay awake on purpose to stop her from moving.

  I swear she fell asleep before me.

  When I woke up in the night, all the lights were out and she wasn’t there. I felt around in the bed for her, but it was empty. It’s weird how everything going dark could wake a person who’s in the dark anyway with their eyes shut, but it did and that’s what happened.

  It was like an actual thing, the dark, like a solid. I didn’t like it. I thought maybe my tent thing was blocking out the light so I reached out and pulled it to one side, but it was still all black in the room.

  “Mum?” I said, a bit quietly, but there wasn’t an answer.

  “Mum!” I said again, louder this time. “Where are you? It’s not funny.”

  I think I called out one more time, I shouted, and then I heard someone on the stairs and everything about me prickled. They were creeping. I could hear my own blood in my ears. If there’d been a spider in the kitchen cupboard I’d’ve heard it. If a cat had licked its fur three streets away it would’ve been deafening. I think my ears were trying to make up for the fact that I was blind. I could hear things moving, above me and below me, and I heard the footsteps again on the stairs, and then someone banged on my door, really loud, and I jumped, even though I’d heard them coming.

  “Who’s that?” I said.

  “It’s Sam. Are you all right?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “You were shouting,” he said.

  “I was looking for my mum.”

  “Are you on your own?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  I told him that Mum was here when I went to sleep, but that I couldn’t see her now. I felt like crying, sitting there in the blackness trying to explain things through a door I couldn’t see.

  “Cherry?” he called, but there was no answer.

  He said that Isabel sent him to get me. He said, “She banged on my ceiling. She wants you to come down.”

  I was scared to move. I was scared of what I might bump into or tread on. I felt my way to the door really slowly. When I opened it I still couldn’t see anything.

  “Why have all the lights gone out?” I said.

  “Power cut. Isabel’s looking for some candles. I had a torch somewhere, but I can’t find it.”

  I let the door shut behind me without thinking and we went down together.

  I hate going on the stairs by myself, even if it’s just a little bit dark. If Sam hadn’t been with me, every corner would’ve had someone lurking in it. The blackness behind me would’ve snuck up and swallowed me whole.

  When we hit the bottom I could feel the carpet under my feet. Isabel’s door must’ve been open already cos Sam said, “Here we are,” and I don’t know how he could see it when I couldn’t. Then we were in her hallway and she was coming towards us with a little candle in her hand. The flame pushed light through the gaps in her fingers, made her face look like a cave. She was wearing a nightie. She looked really, really old.

  She said, “Don’t you just love a power cut? It reminds me of the war.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “Because of the blackout, dear. We had to stop all the light showing so the enemy planes couldn’t find us.”

  “Is that true?” I said.

  “Course it is,” she said. “Now, let me have a look at you. Are you all right? Do you want a biscuit or something?”

  I said I was fine. I said I was asleep and the lights going off woke me up.

  “You’re a light sleeper then,” she said, “like me.”

  We stood there in her hallway for a minute, like we were waiting for a bus or something, and then she said, “Where’s your mum?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She was there before.”

  “She must be out,” Isabel said. “I don’t suppose we know when she’ll be back?”

  How could I when I didn’t even know she was going? “No,” I said. “I don’t suppose we do.”

  We followed her and her candle into the kitchen. My feet were cold and I tried to tuck them in my pyjama trousers, but if I pulled them so they reached my feet, they only half covered my bum.

  “Do you want some socks?” Isabel said.

  “All right.”

  While she was gone to find some there was another knock at the door. Sam got up. “I’ll get that,” he said.

  It was Steve. He was saying something about the whole block being out. Then he said, “I’ve been upstairs and I can’t wake the kid.”

  He said it just as he walked in the kitchen, and he saw me and we smiled. “Oh, hello,” he said. “You’re here already.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “If you look outside,” he said to Sam, “there’s no light anywhere. It’s a proper power failure. It’s not just us.”

  We went to the kitchen window and Steve said, “See?” But you couldn’t see much of anything, which was the point.

  The socks Isabel brought me were big and fluffy and made my feet sweat as soon as I put them on.

  “You can keep those,” she said. “They make my feet sweat.”

  I sat cross-legged at the kitchen table while Isabel made hot chocolate. She called her oven a stove and she called hot chocolate cocoa. When it came it was scalding and not very sweet, and as soon as it wasn’t scalding any more it had this horrible thick skin on it that stuck to my lip and looked all crinkly in the candlelight, like Isabel’s skin.

  Steve poured something out of a little bottle into his.

  “Where’s Mick?” Isabel asked him, and Steve said he’d been on his way out last time he saw him, but that was ages ago.

  “He can’t be in,” Isabel said. “He’d be down here like a shot. He hates the dark.”

  It made me laugh, a grown-up being scared of something like that, and Steve looked at me. “What, weren’t you scared?”

  “Not really,” I said. “Maybe a bit.”

  I couldn’t get comfy on the chair and I wanted to go back to sleep so that waiting for the lights to come back on didn’t feel like forever. I asked if I could go home.

  Isabel said she didn’t think so.

  “I’ll take her,” Sam said.

  “Are you sure you want to go?” Isabel said to me, and I was.

  “I’m tired,” I said. “I want to go
to sleep.”

  “You can sleep here,” she said.

  I said that Mum wouldn’t know where I was if I did that.

  She said something about a taste of her own medicine. I heard her.

  Steve said, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

  “Sam’ll take you then,” she said.

  We borrowed a little nightlight. It didn’t do much to the black all around it. I followed him up the stairs in a wobbly patch of light. When we got to my door I tried to push it open and I couldn’t. Sam tried with his shoulder.

  He said, “You’re locked out.”

  I sat down with my back to the door and my bum on the scratchy doormat. I’d let the door shut behind me. The keys were inside.

  Sam said maybe I should go back downstairs to Isabel’s.

  “No,” I said.

  He said, “You can’t sleep at mine.”

  “I don’t want to. I’ll sleep here.”

  “OK,” he said. “I’ll go and borrow a blanket.”

  “You can’t tell her,” I said. “If you tell her I’ll have to go. Her cocoa is horrible.”

  He said he didn’t have a blanket to lend me and I said I didn’t need one.

  The wax in the nightlight was turning to water, sloshing about. The flame kept almost drowning.

  “You can’t sleep here,” he said. “Isabel will kill me.”

  “My mum’ll be back soon,” I said. “She probably just went for a walk or something.”

  Then Sam said, “Did you leave a window open?”

  “Maybe. Why?”

  “I can climb in if you did.”

  “Climb in how?” I said.

  He said he could go out of his window and up to mine.

  “Is that dangerous?”

  “It’s no different to rock climbing.”

  I said, “Can you really climb a building in the dark. Is that even allowed?”

  Sam smiled. “I’ve done it before. It’s not that hard.”

  He said he was going to go down and find his torch and look out at my windows. He took two steps towards the stairs and started to disappear.