Read Online The Silent Boy by Andrew Taylor - Free Book Online Page B

to calculate its area. He knows how to calculate areas, but only if they form exact squares and rectangles. A further complication is that he does not know exactly how long his paces are.
    He has all these numbers in his head, and he scratches them on the gravel to help him remember. But they are just that – numbers. They don’t tell him other things. They float like clouds, unattached to anything solid.
    In his frustration, Charles kicks the low wall around the pool and hurts his foot. The water is green and covered with weeds and insects that play on the surface as if it were a sheet of glass. Neptune is reflected in the water, sneering up at him.
    Charles picks up a handful of gravel and throws it into the pond. The smooth glass shatters. The reflection of Neptune disintegrates.
    There, he thinks, that will teach you to hurt me.
    That is when he hears the footsteps.
    Charles turns. The gardener’s boy has come into the garden. He walks slowly along the wide alley that runs down the middle of the garden towards Neptune and his pond.
    The gardener’s boy stares at Charles. His face is very serious. His lips are moving slightly. Charles wonders if he is trying to multiply big numbers in his head, perhaps calculating the number of stockings and shirts in his baskets. There are still red weals on his cheek from the beating.
    The boy stops just before he would bump into Charles. He scuffs at the numbers in the gravel, obliterating the facts they record. His face is dirty. He has freckles that make it look dirtier. Words pour out of his mouth in his thick, soft, shapeless voice.
    ‘Goddamned foreigner, you can’t even speak, you’re a baby, you piss in your bed, you’re a windy great looby, you skinny ballocks, you stinking Frog noodle …’
    He says the words over and again, like a prayer. The more he says, the angrier he becomes.
    He takes Charles’s left ear by the lobe. He pinches it. Charles opens his mouth and a scream comes out, a high, wordless sound like a small animal in pain. The boy does not let go. Charles tries to hit and kick him but the boy holds him at arm’s length.
    There is a spark in the boy’s green eyes. He drags Charles’s head backwards. With his other hand he turns Charles around. He forces him to his knees. He bends him over the parapet of the pool.
    The stone coping digs into Charles’s ribs. The gardener’s boy pushes Charles’s head slowly towards the water.
    The sun is reflected in its surface. He closes his eyes. The pain in his ear fills his head with white noise.
    With his free hand the gardener’s boy pins Charles’s body to the parapet.
    The water is cool and as soft as a silk dress. Charles opens his eyes. A fish slips away into the murky depths. He opens his mouth to scream. He swallows water.
    The grip on his ear drags him down and down. His legs flail. The pain in his chest is now worse than the pain in his ear. Then pain has no borders. It goes everywhere.
    In an instant Charles remembers how he saw a man drown a litter of kittens in the yard when he was very small. The man put them one by one into the bucket of water and held them under the surface. The kittens’ legs kicked. The bodies writhed. When there was no more movement, the man took each scrap of dripping fur from the water and laid it on the ground where it lay perfectly still. Then he reached for another kitten, and soon they were all dead. Sodden scraps of flesh and fur.
    While Charles is drowning, in the middle of all the pain, he sees this bucket quite clearly. He sees the man’s hand and remembers how the back of it was covered with black hairs. He sees the head of a drowning kitten between his fingers.
    Then, as suddenly as it began, it is over. Charles is dragged out of the water and thrown to the ground, where he lies, panting and dribbling.
    Slowly the white noise and the pain diminish. Charles coughs. He hears the boy’s running footsteps.
    Charles retches – at first weakly and then with