The Servants. M. Smith M.

raining outside, but he didn't care. He didn't want to stay in the house.

      David said something to him in passing but Mark didn't listen, instead yanking the front door open and running outside, this time not caring how much noise the door made as it slammed behind him. He started quickly down the steps, but they were wet, and he was moving too fast.

      On the second one down he slipped, his foot sliding off and jarring down onto the third. He tried to keep himself upright but his other foot was soon slipping too, and the next thing he knew he was tumbling sideways to land flat on his face, sprawled across a puddle on the pavement.

      The wind was knocked out of him, all at once, and with it went his anger. It was replaced with something smaller and more painful. Something like misery. He had fallen down like this several times every day for weeks, but that had been different. That was just a matter of not being able to keep his balance on the board.

      This time it felt as if he'd been shoved.

      ‘Oh dear,’ said a voice.

      Mark looked up to see an old woman was standing a few feet away on the pavement. The old woman, in fact: the one from the basement flat. She was bundled up in a black coat, woolly and thick, and was holding a little black umbrella.

      She was looking down at him. ‘Horrible day,’ she said.

      Then: ‘Are you hungry?’

       Chapter 4

      WHILE THEY WAITED for the old lady's kettle to boil – it didn't plug into the wall, but sat on the stove – she opened the narrow door at the far end of her room. Beyond it lay a minuscule bathroom. The lady came back holding a towel. It was pale yellow and ragged around the edges but very soft, and Mark used it to dry his hands and face.

      Then he sat in one of the two chairs and looked around the room as the woman made two cups of tea. He felt odd being in here, but when he'd been lying there on the pavement at the old lady's feet with the rain coming down, he hadn't known what else to do. He couldn't go back inside the house because she'd seen him storming out, and also because he just didn't want to. He couldn't go down to the seafront – he'd get soaked.

      There wasn't anywhere else to go. So he'd got to his feet and shrugged. The old woman held up a small brown paper bag.

      ‘I can never finish one all by myself,’ she said. ‘Why don't you come down and share it with me?’

      As she poured water into the teapot, Mark realized he could still detect the odour he'd picked up in the passageway after helping the lady fix her light. It seemed hard to believe it was coming from in here, though. Everything was spotlessly tidy. The top of the little table, and the arms of the chair he sat in, were not home to a single speck of dust. The bed was so tightly made that the blanket was utterly flat. The old-fashioned chrome clock on the bedside table gleamed as if had been polished that morning. The tiny stove – which only had one ring, and a grill about a foot wide – was obviously prehistoric, but still looked as if it had been recently cleaned by a high pressure hose.

      He couldn't help wondering if the smell came from the old lady herself, though that wasn't a nice thought and didn't seem likely. It was a slightly damp, brown smell, and everything about her was dry and white and grey.

      There was only one picture on the walls, and it was very long and thin. It was an old painting, and showed a line of familiar buildings that all looked the same.

      The old lady saw him looking at it. ‘A panorama of the seafront,’ she said. ‘Painted a hundred and seventy years ago.’

      Apart from the fact that the few people in the picture wore strange suits and top hats, or long skirts that bulged out at the back, very little about the view had changed. Mark felt obscurely annoyed at Brighton for being that way. In London, things changed all the time. They went on forever, but they changed. Here things stopped, but stayed the same.

      ‘How long have you lived here?’

      ‘Oh, quite some time,’ she said. ‘But no, I don't remember it that way’

      She put a cup of tea down next to him. It didn't look like any cup of tea he'd seen before. It was dark brown, almost red. ‘There.’

      ‘Is that … a special kind of tea?’

      ‘No,’ she said, lowering herself slowly into the other chair. ‘It's just strong. Most people make their tea far too weak, and what's the point in that? If you want a cup of tea, have a cup of tea. That's what I say’

      Next to the tea she put down a plate on which lay the contents of the brown paper bag. This was a cake, but of a kind with which Mark was unfamiliar, though he thought he might have seen things like it for sale at The Meeting Place. The cake had been cut neatly in half. Mark picked up one part and bit into it cautiously. It was hard and tasted of flour and was studded with little raisins. It was not consistent with his idea of a good time.

      ‘Very nice,’ he said, putting it back down.

      ‘Keep at it,’ she said. ‘Not everything tastes good in the first bite.’

      This sounded uncomfortably like the lecture David had been giving him upstairs, before he ran out, and Mark sat back in his chair.

      ‘Oh dear,’ the old lady said. ‘Did I say something wrong?’

      They remained like that for a while. Mark picked up the cake again, and took another bite. It still tasted odd, as if it came from a time when people ate things because they had to eat, not because they expected to get much pleasure from it. The War, perhaps, when Mark gathered things in general had been somewhat substandard. He liked the tea strong, though, and the third and fourth bites of the cake – by which time he'd lowered his expectations – were not too bad. The raisins were okay, at least.

      ‘Why were you running?’ the old lady asked, out of the silence.

      He shrugged. He didn't know what to say, and he didn't face questions like this very often. If another kid your own age asked then you'd just say the person who'd annoyed you was an arsehole and go kick a football and by the time that was over you wouldn't be so mad. Grown-ups never made that kind of enquiry, and it seemed unlikely the old lady would much fancy knocking a football around. ‘I just wanted to get out of there.’

      ‘Trouble upstairs?’

      ‘I suppose so.’

      The old lady nodded. ‘I hear coughing, sometimes.’

      ‘My mother,’ Mark said, defensively. ‘She's not too well at the moment. She's okay, though.’

      ‘And your father?’

      ‘He's not my father.’

      The old lady paused, her own portion of the rock cake – that's what it was called, apparently – halfway to her mouth. ‘Oh. I understood he was married to your mother.’

      ‘Well, yes, he is.’

      She cocked her head slightly on one side. ‘So …’

      ‘That doesn't make him my dad. I have a dad already. He lives in London.’

      ‘I went to London once,’ she said. ‘Didn't like it much. Too many people. Couldn't tell who anyone was.’

      ‘It's better than here. Stuff happens. You can go to places.’

      Mark had spoken far more sharply than he'd intended, but she didn't seem to notice.

      ‘I'm sure you're right,’ she said.

      She went to the counter and poured a little more water into the teapot. She swirled the pot around, slowly, looking up through the window. The lace curtains prevented you from being able to see much, but you could tell it was still raining hard. ‘How long have they been married?’

      ‘Four