Naked Angels. Judi James

him shake, but he knew it to be true. His brother never came close – he was always hiding in crowds and dodging round corners – but he’d confront him one day, Mikhail was sure of it.

      He had no one else. His mother was gone. Once he had thought about her a lot, but now he no longer knew what it was he should be thinking. Andreas had been his only parent and he had loved him all the more for that. Then he had done the terrible thing, and now he was scared of him.

      Someone was watching. Maybe it was the police at last. He knew they would come for him. He wanted to pee but instead he stood up slowly, shoving his hands deep inside his trouser pockets, and mooched off casually. His black hair looked wet with grease and his face was so pale you could see veins through the skin. He walked quickly but he didn’t run. If you ran you looked as though you were up to no good. Walking with your hands in your pockets looked like you were just on your way to somewhere else.

      He could hear music playing – a violin or a cello. The sound came from the railwaymen’s huts nearby. There was a smell of fresh coffee, too. Mikhail felt his stomach begin to contract with hunger. The men in there would be shaving. He thought he could smell the soap – lavender, maybe. It was as though the balloon in his chest had burst. Beads of angry sweat appeared on his forehead, even though it was winter and well below zero outside. He sobbed out loud and kicked at the wall as he passed it, and a lump of china tile fell off onto the ground.

      The metro was old. The place was crumbling. The smell of the coffee wouldn’t go away, even though he had passed the last of the huts now.

      The station was not a deep one and there were only a few steps to the pavement. The air that hit him was so cold he almost urinated where he stood. He set off for the old fruit market to steal some food.

      They had made him go to a hostel at first, after Andreas’s death. The place was warm and the food first-rate, but he had found he couldn’t stand the fear of waiting all the time to be arrested. They would have come for him before long, he was sure of that. The two policemen at the mortuary had looked at him as though they’d known something was up. He couldn’t just wait for them; he’d had to run away.

      He’d gone back to the room he’d shared with his brother, but the locks had been changed, which didn’t surprise him. He’d tried with his penknife, just in case, but the padlock held firm. Maybe it was just as well – they would have come for him there too, sooner or later. He’d wanted to get inside for a little while, though, just to check; to make sure things had really happened as they had.

      So now he was living on the street. Andreas would have been mad with him – it was the one thing they’d always avoided. He pushed off down Vaci utca and past all the old pastry shops. The wind was cold but he wore his brother’s coat and it was a good one; it kept him almost warm.

      He had always envied Andreas’s heavy coat and now it belonged to him. It had been lying around at the mortuary and he’d taken it, just like that. It was too big but that was all the better because it kept his legs warm, too. That was the other thing about the hostel: they had made all the boys wear short pants and he had felt stupid in them, like a child. He was twelve years old, nearly thirteen. No one of his age should be made to wear short pants, it was ridiculous.

      He pulled one of Andreas’s cigarettes out of the breast pocket of Andreas’s coat and lit it with a match from Andreas’s box. The smoke kept his mouth warm. He cupped his hands over his face and inhaled as deeply as he could.

       6

       Cape Cod 1966

      The Bentley was a pretty good drive – maybe even better than the Oldsmobile. Evangeline had made quite fair friends with the chauffeur on the school run and she knew the car had power steering and a sixteen horse-power engine – which meant that even if you had sixteen real horses harnessed to the front of the chassis the car wouldn’t have gone any faster than it did.

      Grandma Klippel had paid good money to get her into that school. She could tell from the other grand cars in the drive and from the way the kids spoke without moving their lips much, but despite all that money they still had sneers and secrets leaking out of those mean little mouths.

      Evangeline knew something else, too – a secret not even the know-all-miss-snotty kids knew. A secret even her grandmother wasn’t aware of. A terrible thing. She knew that her parents were dead.

      They were all dead: Thea, Darius, baby Lincoln – maybe even Patrick, too, though she wasn’t sure about that. The chauffeur had told her by sheer mean mistake. He hadn’t meant to, she knew that. It had sort of slipped out while they were talking one day. It wasn’t his fault and she never found out how he knew, because Grandma Klippel had no idea – she knew that for sure.

      ‘My grandmother told me they’d gone away,’ she’d said. Grandma never lied; it just wasn’t possible.

      The back of the chauffeur’s neck had glowed strawberry-patch red.

      ‘Maybe that’s what she thinks,’ he’d told her after a while. It had been difficult for him to say it at all. The words seemed caught somewhere in his throat.

      ‘Maybe she’s right.’ Evangeline didn’t know what was worse: that they’d gone away or that they’d died. There didn’t seem a whole mess of difference if they were never coming back. Dead sounded worse, though. She felt that snot in the back of her throat again, distorting all her words when she tried to speak.

      ‘Maybe,’ the chauffeur echoed.

      ‘But they are dead.’

      ‘Yeah. I’m sorry. Don’t tell your grandmother. Please.’

      It was a while before Evangeline could talk at all. Dead: like the fish and the seagull, and empty, like the quahog shells. Floating on the oily surface of the water with their eyes all white like pearls, and blind.

      ‘Did they drown?’ she asked.

      ‘I doubt it.’ So he didn’t know either.

      ‘Why doesn’t my grandmother know?’ she asked.

      The chauffeur shrugged. She could see his eyes in the rear-view mirror. He looked scared.

      ‘Maybe because she’s old. Maybe the shock …’ his voice faded away. Evangeline nodded. The shock would make her ill. The thing was to keep it from her. It sounded like a useful plan. Darius would be proud of her when he got back. She was confused, or was she? She still felt they were all coming back, that was the problem. She still felt it as much as when she knew they were gone. It just didn’t happen. Nobody left their kids alone for too long.

      The good thing was she hadn’t cried properly – not in front of the chauffeur and not in front of the other kids, anyway. The chauffeur would have been embarrassed about telling her all over again if she had. She didn’t want him feeling awkward over such a stupid mistake. It could have happened to anybody. And she definitely didn’t cry in front of her grandmother. Keeping it secret was important; if she’d cried as much as she wanted to the old lady would have known something was up and maybe even have died herself.

      She’d known the other kids were watching her at school, she could feel their squinting eyes on her back throughout each and every class. Did they know too? She always sat up straight as a post, just like her grandmother had been teaching her, and she never let anything show on her face. She knew they felt cheated, somehow, and she was glad. The secret made her special; important, even. She had to be special, Grandma Klippel said that over and over. Make Darius proud of her. Make Thea proud of her. It was something to do. It was a way of working to get them all back.

      Evangeline watched the coastline go by as they drove back to the house. The sea looked so different with a slick of sun on it. It didn’t scare her when it looked like that. She didn’t think her parents were on the other side of the sea any more, either.

      ‘Do you know if Patrick died too?’ she asked.