Louder Than Words Page 20

She expected him to mooch off and think about it. Or perhaps get angry again. Boys could be unpredictable like that, frustration blowing out of them in raised voices and smashed things unexpectedly just when you thought they’d calmed down. Not like her dad. Her dad’s anger was slow to flame, but so much more terrible because it was a fire more difficult to extinguish. There was no shouting at her and never anything broken, but the part that was hardest to bear was the look of disappointment that came with it. Thank God . . . no, thank Silas really . . . that he’d never found out about Lloyd. She wished she’d never lied to him about it now because Lloyd was in no way worth it, but it had been a season of temporary insanity, her love for him.

  ‘It wasn’t really love,’ Josie said slowly. And it must have been to Silas for there was no one else there to hear her. ‘I don’t think love is really like that. Do you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said finally, ‘but I do know I wouldn’t waste another second of my time thinking about that moron.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Do you think we should go and speak to Rafi?’ he suggested. ‘Present a united front?’

  Josie nodded again.

  ‘Come on.’

  He knocked on my door. ‘Rafi, open it, please. We want to talk to you.’

  It wasn’t opened instantly. I was busy and it took a little more persuasion than that, but eventually I unlocked it and they walked into my room.

  Silas stared, his mouth open, shock written plainly on his face. ‘Rafi, what are you doing?’

  CHAPTER 49

  I clicked the lid back on the permanent black marker as Silas stared at the white wall on the other side of my bedroom, now disfigured with black scrawl.

  ‘If you don’t understand my silence, how will you ever understand my words?’ he read aloud in a dazed voice.

  Josie raised an eyebrow at me, and then marched forward and grabbed the pen. She uncapped it, selected a fresh bit of wall and wrote in her own distinctive scrolling hand:

  Courage is fear that didn’t give up.

  Tears welled up in my eyes.

  ‘What? What is going on?’ my brother asked.

  Josie understood my silence. Better than anyone ever had.

  ‘It’s Rafi’s truth wall,’ Josie replied.

  Silas walked over and sat on my bed. ‘Look, I don’t get any of this. Can someone please tell me what is going on?’

  Josie went and sat next to him. ‘It’s Rafi’s thing – she collects quotes. Things that are like the big truths in life. She’s very into that stuff. She keeps them in a book. We swap our favourites.’

  ‘You do it too?’

  ‘Kind of. I have a thing for Pinterest. You know, ten minutes where I’m bored and there’s nothing doing, I get my phone out and scroll through the quotes page on there. Pin my favourites. So when I found out Rafi liked that stuff, we started swapping.’

  Silas pointed to the wall. ‘So what is this?’

  Josie grinned at me. ‘This is Rafi shouting, that’s what this is.’

  I stumbled towards her and hugged her. I hugged her for knowing.

  She spoke to Silas over the top of my head. ‘Rafi doesn’t shout enough. That’s her problem. She lets herself disappear and not be heard. If you ask me, this here –’ and she nodded to the wall ‘– is one hell of a good thing.’

  ‘Right.’ Silas still sounded more than half confused but I heard the lid on the marker pop again and he got up.

  When I looked round, he was writing on the wall too:

  One word spoken by you is more important than a thousand from others.

  He capped the pen and tossed it back to me. ‘I love you,’ he said.

  ‘Who said that?’ Josie asked, pointing at his writing.

  He looked me straight in the eyes. ‘Me,’ he replied, and then he went out and closed the door gently behind him.

  Josie shook her head slowly. ‘You know, there’ve been moments when I’ve thought your brother is practically a saint, and others where I’ve thought that he’s a whole new level of dumb. But right now, I totally get why you think he’s a genius.’

  And there she lullèd me asleep,

  And there I dream’d – Ah! Woe betide!

  The latest dream I ever dream’d

  On the cold hill’s side.

  (John Keats – ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’)

  CHAPTER 50

  Dear Dad,

  I don’t know how to make sense of anything any more. Just when you think you have it all sussed out, then . . .

  Rafi. And Josie.

  So this morning, Josie goes crazy at me for neglecting Rafi when she needs me. I got mad because I know she’s right. There was no need for her to be bitchy about Lara though – it’s not her fault.

  But Josie asked me this question about her and her dick of an ex. She asked me if what she felt for him, what I feel for Lara, is really love. Now how would you answer that?

  Anything with half the intensity of what I feel with Lara can’t be anything other than love. Josie’s thing with Lloyd might have been a crush. My thing isn’t. It’s like that garbage poetry they make you read in school – two souls entwined, all of that. Maybe that stuff isn’t as much garbage as I thought when they made me study it.

  But I can’t understand why Josie wanted to confide this in me. She sounded . . . sad . . . in a way I haven’t seen her be since just after the Lloyd incident. I haven’t really told you much about Josie. I’ve never spoken much to her in depth, just regular ‘heys’ and ‘how are yous’ unless it’s about Rafi. But I’ve got used to her face around the place. She smiles a lot. She laughs a lot. I hadn’t realised until just then, when I saw her so far from smiling as she remembered that jerk that it made me unhappy too. She’s like a weather forecast, Josie – mainly sunshine with the occasional shower. It’s only when the showers come that you know you miss the sunshine.

  And then, weirder than all that, just before we went upstairs to see Rafi, I gave her a quick, one-armed, friendly hug. I just wanted to take her sadness away. I would have thought it would feel like hugging Rafi. But it didn’t.

  I keep trying to block it out, how she fitted perfectly into my shoulder, that she was so warm and soft, that she smelt ever so faintly of peach or mango or something else I couldn’t identify. On another girl it might have been sickly, but on her it just smelt right. I just don’t understand why I noticed that stuff at all.

  I want Lara. Only Lara.

  Would you know? I guess you would. You left Mum for another woman after all. This will sound horrible, but I don’t want to be like that, Dad. I don’t want to have inherited that side of you.

  I went over to Dillon’s later and I felt guilty when I saw Lara. They were being kind of weird over there too, which didn’t help.

  ‘So how do we top that?’ Dillon leaned back on the kitchen chair as he posed the question.

  ‘You know they’re after us now, right?’ Jez propped his chin on his hand.

  ‘They won’t find us. Our boy here knows how to cover his tracks.’

  They looked at me and I smiled and nodded.

  ‘What do you think we should do next?’ Katrin asked with that barbed tone she always uses with me. And only with me. For whatever reason, she doesn’t seem to like me much.

  Lara was by my side, her fingers linked with mine. She squeezed gently and I smiled for no reason at all other than she was there and I was with her.

  ‘Spot hits next,’ I replied. ‘We proved how extensive we can be. Now let’s focus on serious damage.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Denial of Service is one thing and it gets attention, sure. But it doesn’t disrupt for long enough. What I’d like to do is get into one area and make a serious mess in there. Something that gives them a real headache to unpick.’

  Katrin shrugged. ‘I don’t really understand what you mean, but if it makes our point then fine.’

  ‘I want to cause enough trouble that they have to throw money at
it to fix it. Hit them in the pocket! That’s all they recognise, right, Dillon?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘But isn’t that going to take more money from the pockets of the very people we want to help? Because the cash they throw at it to fix it doesn’t come from nowhere,’ Jez said.

  ‘How is that any different to how much it costs them when you guys start a riot?’ I replied.

  Jez shrugged. ‘Yeah, I guess. But some of this is starting to leave a bad taste in my mouth. Is it what we’re really about? It’s beginning to feel like glory seeking to me.’ His eyes shifted slightly off me when he said that, but they didn’t quite rest on anyone else. He got up and walked softly from the kitchen.

  ‘Is he with us or not?’ Dillon snapped at Katrin. ‘I can’t afford any liabilities now.’

  ‘He’d like to see some result from our campaigning.’

  ‘We got a result! Everyone knows about us now. What more does he want?’

  ‘Fewer children dying. More access to clean water. Little things like that,’ Katrin said with an acid edge.

  ‘Oh, come on! He expects that overnight?’

  ‘He’s been with us a long time. I think he expects to see something positive. And also I don’t think he approves of the means to your end either.’

  I swear Dillon coloured up as Katrin got up and followed her boyfriend.

  ‘What? He doesn’t want us to use cyber-attack?’ I asked.

  ‘Dunno,’ Tyler said. ‘Jez is a quiet one. You never know what’s going on in his head. So this thing you’ve got planned . . . tell me more now the non-techies have gone.’

  Lara stood with me later in the backyard of the house and we looked up into the night sky together.

  ‘You can’t see many stars in a city,’ she said. ‘I could see more where I lived when I was a child.’

  ‘You don’t call it home.’

  ‘It was never home.’

  ‘Why not?’

  She switched her gaze from the sky to me in surprise. ‘Do you know you’re the first person who’s ever asked me that? Because I never fitted. I wasn’t the daughter they wanted. My sisters were, but not me.’

  ‘You have sisters?’

  ‘Yes. I was the middle one.’ Her mouth twisted. ‘Supposed to be difficult in other words, so I guess I was predictable.’

  ‘You were the middle one?’

  ‘Yeah. They’re not dead or anything. It’s just so long since I felt part of all that.’

  ‘But now you’re part of this and that’s enough?’

  She pulled my head down to kiss me, her lips against mine as addictive as ever. And I was in that space again where there are only the two of us.

  ‘This is kind of corny,’ she said when we eventually parted. ‘Kissing under the stars.’

  ‘I can live with that,’ I said, my lips chasing hers again and finding them.

  ‘Will you come away with me to Africa?’ she said as we walked back to the train station later.

  I nearly said something very embarrassing like I’d go anywhere for her. She would have hated that so I settled on a simple, ‘Yes,’ and it pleased her. She told me I was special, more than any guy she’d ever met.

  Dad, I wish you were here. I wish if I asked Mum for your address, she’d give it to me. But that isn’t going to happen.

  I miss you,

  Silas

  CHAPTER 51

  I called it fate when Andrea cancelled our next appointment because she’d come down with flu. Josie called it an opportunity to practise more. I still hadn’t tried again since Failure Night a few days ago. Josie spent half an hour trying to convince me to have a go, but I wasn’t ready yet. Maybe tomorrow.

  In the meantime, I had other things to worry about. Silas was still not hanging out with his friends, despite Josie’s tongue-lashing, and the last two days he’d skipped school too. He said he had work to catch up on, but I wasn’t convinced. He was holed up in his bedroom all the time. He didn’t even go out to see Lara – she came round to him and they hid upstairs together in his room.

  That wasn’t all of it though. I’d picked up my mother’s newspaper yesterday and read an article on ‘the extraordinary cyber-crime of the year’. ‘Previously no more than a raggle-taggle group of anarchist protesters, not necessarily given to violence, but not entirely averse to it either’ was how one paper described them, but now apparently they were in the Security Services’ most-wanted sights. And not just in this country either. The FBI considered them a potential threat.

  It wasn’t going away. That’s what all this added up to and I couldn’t keep hoping it’d all just fizzle out.

  What had Silas got into? And how could we get him out of it?

  ‘You mean what has that girl got him into?’ Josie said with a sour twist to her mouth when I’d finally managed to explain all this to her through a combination of text and scribbling on a pad. She read through the article again. ‘They’re saying this is an incredibly sophisticated attack. If he did do this, did he do it alone? I know Silas is good, but is he really this good?’

  I didn’t know, but if he was it didn’t surprise me.

  ‘What do you want to do? Ask him?’

  There was a time when if I’d asked, he would have told me the truth. Now I wasn’t sure he would.

 

  CHAPTER 52

  Silas left the house at 3 p.m. rubbing his eyes. He’d slept at some point a few hours ago, but before that not for a long while. Day and night were all mixed up now, his body clock hopelessly awry. This was a good thing for us as he was too spaced out to notice us slipping through the streets after him.

  ‘It’ll be harder once he meets up with her,’ Josie whispered. ‘We’ll have to be really careful then.’

  Whatever. I wasn’t letting him out of my sight.

  As we expected, he met up with Lara near the bus station. Josie and I managed to stay out of sight fairly easily as he and Lara walked hand in hand through town. The streets were long and straight so we could follow from a distance and they were too busy gazing at each other to notice us.

  ‘She seems a lot keener on him than she used to be,’ Josie said.

  Was that because he was into all this stupid anarchy stuff now?

  When they turned into the train station, Josie grimaced. ‘This could be awkward. Hold back – I think we can see from here.’

  But we couldn’t see where they were getting a ticket to so we had to watch until they went down to the platform. Josie had a flash of inspiration. She dragged me up to the ticket booth that Silas had just been at.

  ‘Hi!’ She gave the ticket man a big, beaming, utterly innocent grin. ‘My friends texted me to say meet them now on platform 2. We’re going somewhere for my birthday surprise, but they forgot I won’t know what tickets to buy – doh!’

  ‘London train, departing in six minutes?’ the ticket seller replied.

  ‘Yes, that’ll be it! They knew I wanted to go and see Les Miserbles. I bet we’re going there. Oh, thank you, you’re a star!’

  She bought us tickets and then we scurried down to lurk on the platform near the toilets where they wouldn’t see us.

  ‘We can hide in there if they come this way,’ Josie said.

  When the train arrived there were only three carriages and we waited until Lara and Silas got into the far one. Josie managed to get a window seat near the door. ‘We’ll have to jump off quickly when we see them get off.’

  But they got off before we reached the terminus in the centre of London, so Josie and I had to scramble out quickly and hurry after them as Lara set off out of the station with a much more purposeful march than she’d used before.

  It was raining here. It’s easier to follow someone in the rain, I discovered. They keep their heads tucked down and don’t look round. We tracked them to a mid-terraced house on a nondescript street and watched them go in.

  ‘Is this where she lives?’ Josie said. ‘Because it’s not where she said she d
id.’

  I made a motion with my hand, mimicking Lara pressing the bell. She’d have a key if she lived there.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Josie said.

  We stood helplessly for a while, not knowing what to do next. Then a man hurried past us, knocking into us with a mumbled sorry as he tried to avoid a deep puddle beside us on the pavement. I caught a flash of fairish hair and goatee beard beneath his soaked hoody, and then he too went into the house.

  ‘Now he did have a key,’ Josie said. She sneaked closer to the house. ‘Number 33. Come on, let’s get the street name. And then we’ll do some digging. We can’t stand here all night getting wet, but there are other ways of finding out what we need to know.’

  We found our way back to the station with some difficulty because neither of us had had the sense to notice where we were going once we got off the train, other than that we were following Lara and Silas. Josie had to stop someone for directions a couple of times. We were sopping wet by the time we got on the train, clutching giant paper cups of coffee with shaking hands.

  ‘Nothing we’ve seen tells us if Silas is involved in that stuff or not,’ Josie said with a groan, her teeth chattering on the plastic sippy lid as she gulped some coffee. ‘We need to find out who lives at that house. I’m going to have to get tricky with Dad. But I’ll need your help.’

  When we finally got home, the most sensible thing to do was run hot baths and get changed. ‘Meet me at mine in an hour,’ Josie said as she left me at the gate. ‘I’ll cook something.’

  We hadn’t eaten dinner yet so I was in a hurry to get back to her place. I threw my clothes in the laundry basket and soaked myself in a hot bath until I could feel my toes and fingers again, then I got out and put some warm, comfy gear on and dried my hair. Going out in the rain again wasn’t the nicest thing, but I jogged so I was there in a couple of minutes.

  ‘Hi,’ said Josie, flinging the door open and pulling me in out of the bad weather. ‘Dad’s here,’ she continued under her breath, ‘so keep up with me. I’m going to put the plan into action.’