Louder Than Words Read online

  He flicked through channels and appeared to lose himself in the news reports.

  This was Dad’s fault. He should be here to talk to his son about male issues. He should be here setting an example, a role model for my brother, instead of being a dysfunctional mess who couldn’t stick at anything or fight for anyone. Let’s face it, he must know my mother wasn’t going to be of much help to a seventeen-year-old boy confused about relationships. Since he left she had eschewed men (I loved that word eschew – it reminded me of Miss Havisham for some unaccountable reason) and devoted herself to ‘her art’.

  Silas sat forward, attracting my attention, and stared intently at the TV.

  I crossed the room and tapped his shoulder in question as I sat down next to him.

  ‘Shush!’ he said.

  I cast my eyes up at the ceiling. I knew what he meant, but oh, the irony!

  The reporter on the TV said something about anarchists and a city riot. I was only half listening. The pictures showed the usual thing – teens and twenty-somethings all dressed in black, running around with masks on, throwing bricks at police and smashing windows.

  Bunch of idiots. What was the point? They weren’t going to achieve anything. Some of the ones at the back had banners with anti-government messages painted on them in red, with circled ‘A’s daubed in each corner. You could see in the pictures that they were checking mobile phones all the time and relaying instructions to each other.

  But why was Silas so interested? I poked his shoulder again.

  ‘They’re protesting against government corruption,’ he said. ‘It’s pretty fascinating how much dirt they’ve managed to dig up and leak to the media in the last few days. They’re all over Twitter at the moment, spreading the word on who’s done what.’

  Corruption?

  ‘A lot of dodgy stuff that the Cabinet has tried to sweep under the carpet. If you ask me, these guys aren’t really that mad about it, but it gives them a stick to beat the government with and get the public more onside at the same time. But I reckon their main interest is just raising hell, whoever’s in power.’

  Yeah, whatever. I couldn’t see the attraction at all. Like spraying graffiti tags on walls and smashing bus shelters – utterly useless and mindless. Anyone with half a brain wouldn’t want to bother.

  I made a drinking motion with my hand at Silas.

  ‘Oh yeah, thanks. Coffee would be good please.’

  I wandered off to the kitchen, leaving him to watch the losers on the news.

  CHAPTER 10

  Josie was waiting for us when we got off the school bus.

  ‘You are not going to believe this.’

  ‘Oh, I think I might,’ Silas said under his breath. Only I heard him.

  ‘Lloyd turned up outside school today and apologised to me in full view of EVERYONE! And . . .’ She paused to check we were taking this in fully. ‘And he said, so they could all hear it, that the photos of me weren’t real and he’d faked them.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Silas, with a grin that bordered on smug. ‘Result!’

  She chuckled. ‘Oh, and he added, very, very quietly, that would I please tell whoever it was on his back that he’d done it now and get them to leave him alone. Actually, his exact words were, “Now call off your pit bull!” Bless!’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Silas, kicking a pebble down the pavement as he walked, ‘I’ll take my teeth out of his neck now. As long as he keeps away. Hopefully he’s learned his lesson and he’s sussed that, when you try to be a player, you’ve got to face the possibility that there’s someone who will play nastier than you.’

  Certainly if Lloyd hadn’t got that message by now then he must be really thick.

  ‘I owe you massive thanks,’ Josie said to him.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ Silas replied. ‘Not at all. You’re hanging out with my sister and it’s making her happy so you don’t owe me a thing.’

  He didn’t see my face, but Josie did. I turned away abruptly and pretended to fiddle with something inside my bag. Silas walked on, but Josie shook her head at me as I followed slowly. ‘Later,’ she whispered.

  My throat was tight and rough, as if sandpaper had been drawn down it. There was a scream waiting to come out. Of rage at Silas, that I didn’t want a friend bought by his actions. I didn’t want one on those terms. I wanted one like everybody else. One who liked me for me.

  How did he not know that?

  Josie invited me into her house as we got to the gate and I accepted gratefully. I didn’t even want to see Silas right now.

  ‘I honestly don’t think he meant it how it sounded,’ she said as we walked up her front path. ‘I know how you interpreted it and I know why – he didn’t phrase it well. But really all I think he meant was, “You’re my sister’s friend so I’ve got your back.”’

  I nodded, because it was expected of me, but she wasn’t fooled.

  ‘Now are you going to be so dumb that I have to tell you that is so not why we’re friends? Please tell me you know that, right?’

  I don’t know. Maybe.

  ‘I will get really mad with you if I have to explain that we’re friends because we’re just made to be. Because I totally thought you understood that already!’

  Possibly . . .

  ‘Oh, come on, Rafi!’

  I forced myself to nod more certainly. Trust, right? That’s what friends did.

  She twitched her mouth from side to side, assessing me. Then she got her phone out and opened up her Pinterest page. ‘See that?’

  It was a quote by Emily Dickinson, written under a picture of an umbrella: ‘I felt it shelter to speak to you.’

  Ridiculously, tears welled up in my eyes.

  ‘See, stoopid,’ Josie said gruffly and hugged me. ‘Now come in and I’ll make us milkshakes with ice cream.’

  Josie’s house was a large Victorian villa with a double front. She pointed out a black VW Golf on the drive. ‘My dad’s old car. He’s saving it for me when I learn to drive next year.’ I looked suitably impressed.

  We skirted round the path to the side of the house, through high, dense laurel hedges, to a side porch hidden from view from the road.

  ‘We never use the front door,’ she said, unlocking the porch and letting me into a big open-plan kitchen. It wasn’t at all what I expected from the exterior, which was traditional decor framed by the standard period-style garden. But inside the walls had been ripped down to make a huge space painted stark white with glossy white kitchen units and a pale stone floor. The kitchen ran on into a living space with contemporary white sofas and a giant plasma TV screen mounted on the wall.

  ‘This is where we mostly hang out,’ she said.

  We. She meant her and her dad of course. It seemed an awfully big space for the two of them. Come to think of it, it was a massive house for the two of them. I wondered if she had hoped to fill it with her friends before everything went wrong. Maybe two or three lounging around would make the room seem less barren.

  She walked over to the island in the kitchen and began pulling glasses from a cupboard and throwing fruit and milk and ice cream into a blender. I watched, fascinated, from a high stool. This was not something I was familiar with. Silas might cook, but he didn’t make fripperies like this. She whizzed the whole lot together and then decanted it into two tall glasses, added another scoop of vanilla ice cream to the top of each and stuck a straw in.

  ‘Voilà!’ she said, sliding a glass towards me and taking a deep, satisfied suck on her straw.

  It tasted great: summer in a glass.

  She caught my eye. ‘Yeah, good, isn’t it?’

  The door opened and closed behind me and I turned nervously to find a man in a suit coming in. He was tall and broad-shouldered with a serious face. His skin was a darker shade of brown than Josie’s and his hair was buzz-cut short.

  ‘Hello,’ he said to me and he had the deepest voice I’d ever heard. Rich too, a voice with many layers and tones, but most of all with a quiet and u
ndeniable authority. This was not a man you argued with. I understood now why Toby said that day on the bus that Josie would never let her dad know what Lloyd had done. I’d tremble at having to confess anything to him.

  And yet . . . he gave off this feeling that he’d keep you completely safe no matter what. Maybe she should have told him. He might have been mad at her, and his version of mad at you might be terribly difficult to take without crumbling to bits, but he’d have taken care of it. Of that I was sure.

  Safe. Strong. That’s what I got from him in the instant we weighed each other up. I wondered what he got from me.

  ‘Dad, this is Rafi from down the street. You remember I told you she doesn’t talk.’

  I raised my hand in a polite little wave.

  He smiled, a small, reserved thing, but oddly comforting. ‘Yes. Hi, it’s nice that Josie’s made a friend here already. She’s talked about you a lot. She says you’re a very smart girl. And I can see that she’s right.’

  I felt the surprise express itself on my face.

  He tapped the side of his head with one finger. ‘Policeman’s prerogative, summing a person up in a few seconds. And we have to be good at it.’ He gave me a slow, serious wink and then walked towards the hall. ‘I’m off to shower work away and get changed. Josie, why don’t you cook something for your friend if she’s hungry. She’s welcome to stay for dinner.’

  And in that moment how I wished he was my dad. Did Josie know how lucky she was? That calm, stable presence there at the end of every day for her. Expecting the best of her, but there to pick up the pieces when she failed.

  ‘You want to stay for dinner?’ Josie cocked her head at me hopefully.

  Did dogs like bones? Yes, I wanted to stay. I wanted to drink in this atmosphere so I knew forever what normal was. Like an addict waiting for a hit, I wanted this sense of family vicariously over and over again.

  Right then I was glad I had no words because I would not have wanted to have told my brother about this. It would have made me too sad.

  I met a lady in the meads,

  Full beautiful – a faery’s child,

  Her hair was long, her foot was light,

  And her eyes were wild.

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

  CHAPTER 11

  Josie and I settled into a rhythm of hanging out with each other most evenings and weekends. Despite my expectation that once the Lloyd business was over she would take up with her other friends again, that simply hadn’t happened. It seemed that, like Mr Darcy, her good opinion once lost was lost forever. I ventured to say this to her, by text of course, and she laughed about it. Threw her head right back and laughed and laughed. ‘Yeah, my sister, you’re right about that.’

  She called me that sometimes – my sister – and it made me happy.

  My mother had an exhibition at a local gallery and insisted, in a rare moment of desire for familial solidarity, that we all went along one Saturday. Josie, never having had to suffer the exhibitions before, was fascinated and begged to come along. Silas didn’t inflict it on any of his friends so there were just the three of us. There were a couple of other artists debuting in the exhibition, but my mother was the main attraction.

  Silas and I looked politely over our mother’s work, but really Josie was far more interested than we were. And then it would have been incredibly rude of us not to have given some time to the other artists so we trudged round their work too, listening to erudite types expounding on the merits of each piece. Or actually trying not to listen, but those people always have such loud voices that you can’t shut them out.

  We stopped in front of a sculpture and I had the first glimmer of genuine interest I’d had in the whole two hours we’d been here. At first glance it looked like a heap of twisted metal and no more, but look closer and you could see tiny creatures hiding within – a field mouse, a butterfly, a wren . . . I walked round it, looking for more. I heard Josie exclaim and I knew she’d begun to see too.

  But Silas . . . Silas never did see it. Because just as he began to focus on the sculpture to see what had so attracted our attention, a girl stepped into his line of sight.

  I caught her scent before I saw her, a subtle, warm waft of fruit and spices. She stood, one hand on her hip, one foot turned out in front of the other like a dancer. Silky black hair fell straight past her shoulders, framing a heart-shaped face with porcelain skin which appeared to be free of make-up. She was dressed entirely in black: black jeans, black T-shirt, black canvas parka with a fishtail back that reached her knees and black Converse sneakers. She was small, maybe five foot two, and slim enough to be jealous of, but with enough curves to be even more jealous of. I felt Josie draw in a breath of envy beside me as she spotted the girl.

  Josie was pretty, yes, but this girl was in another league. It wasn’t any one of her features individually that made her beautiful, but all put together she exuded something that even Josie and I could see.

  Silas looked like he’d been sucker-punched.

  ‘You like this one?’ She spoke to me first, not to him.

  Nod.

  ‘Then you like hidden depths,’ she said with a secretive smile. She turned to Silas. ‘How about you?’

  ‘Er . . . yeah . . . er . . .’ Silas’s cheeks had turned a faint pink.

  Josie kissed her teeth and turned back to the sculpture.

  The girl gave her a faintly amused glance and then proceeded to ignore her.

  ‘I noticed you walking around.’ I wasn’t sure which of us she was talking to. ‘Why do you come to an exhibition if you don’t like it?’

  Silas finally appeared to find words again. ‘Oh, our mother’s exhibiting so, you know, we’ve seen all her stuff before.’

  ‘Clarissa Ramsey is your mother? Wow, that’s amazing.’ But she didn’t say it as if she found it amazing. More like she was secretly laughing at us because that’s how we expected her to react. She’d said what most people said when we told them who our mother was.

  Josie wandered off to look at the next sculpture and I hesitated, caught between following her and worried about what would happen if I did. Silas was being highly weird with this girl.

  ‘It’s kind of more interesting for us to look at the other exhibitors,’ he said, apparently not minding if she was laughing at him.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, swapping her feet round in that strange half-third position she was standing in. ‘So what’s your favourite work today?’

  He opened his mouth to answer her and then stopped, flummoxed.

  ‘Cat got your tongue?’ she said, starting to look away across the gallery as if he was boring her.

  Silas laughed, a hard, surprised snort. ‘Looks like it,’ he said.

  She looked back at him, mild interest reviving. ‘So do you have a favourite piece?’

  ‘Not really.’ He shrugged.

  ‘Honesty,’ she said thoughtfully, running her tongue over her teeth – small, white, even teeth. ‘Finally.’

  He gave a rueful smile and stared at his feet. I could tell he was thinking he’d blown something. Suddenly, passionately and desperately, I hoped he had.

  ‘Lara,’ she said abruptly, holding her hand out to shake in an oddly adult gesture. How old was she? Around eighteen?

  My brother took her hand in a firm but gentle grip. ‘Silas.’

  She raised a perfectly arched eyebrow. ‘Unusual.’

  ‘Yes.’

  At any other time, or with any other girl, it would be funny to see him so at sea, but I had a strong feeling he was swimming way too far out from shore. I called him back in my head, for all the good that would do.

  She straightened up. ‘I should go. I have stuff to do.’

  Silas’s face fell. Yup, he’d blown it. And then inspiration struck him. ‘Can I buy you a coffee? There’s a café opposite here.’

  She regarded him with an impenetrable expression. ‘No, I don’t think so, thank you. Goodbye.’ And with that she walke
d off and didn’t look back.

  Silas stared after her like a dog whose bone has been taken away.

  Josie reappeared by my shoulder. ‘Hmmm . . .’ she said, ‘who on earth was she?’

  I shrugged, perplexed.

  ‘Loves herself for sure,’ Josie said with a sniff.

  But you would, wouldn’t you, if you looked like her? To have that much power, to stop a boy in his tracks that way, so that even now he was staring after the place where you’d been, it was inconceivable to me. My head could not imagine inhabiting a world where that was my reality. And of course it never would be.

  I wondered how it made Lara feel. Did she even notice how far removed she was from girls like me, the ones who slip through life without ever turning a head in the street? Or were we not worthy of her attention?

  When my brother finally turned away from the spot where she’d last been, his eyes held a misty look, as if he was still not back with us, still somewhere trailing in her wake.

  CHAPTER 12

  I couldn’t sleep so I pulled a hoody over my pyjamas and padded across the landing in bare feet to Silas’s room. I didn’t knock in case it woke my mother, but scratched quietly on his door instead.

  ‘Come in,’ was the whispered response.

  I closed the door softly behind me and tapped a question on his shoulder.

  He grinned briefly as he typed some mumbo-jumbo. ‘Fixing the stuff I did to get Josie’s loser to leave her alone.’ He gestured to his bed and I curled up on there, pulling a corner of the duvet over my legs. ‘But the crap I took down on that website stays taken down. Some of those comments! They were so far beyond out of order, they were in the stratosphere. I don’t get guys like that – they say they like girls, but they don’t or they wouldn’t talk about them that way. Don’t you ever go out with a boy who objectifies women that way!’

  It was touching that he thought a boy would ever ask me to go out with him but there, that was classic Silas, forgetting how few people had the confidence not to follow and go with popular opinion.