Gary McMahon - Silent Voices

Outside, someone lets off a firework. Marty turns back to the window, drawn by the sound, and he watches the brief flaring of red and blue lights in the sky. The lights splutter and die as they fall back to the ground. Their flight is over before it has even begun.

“I hate you,” he whispers, not even knowing if he means his father, the estate where he feels so trapped, or even himself. Sometimes he even despises his mother for being so weak, for not running away from the man who so casually and regularly abuses her.

He thinks about the silly tree house he and his friends are building. The Three Amigos — the name was Simon’s idea, after some film he read about in a magazine, a comedy about rubbish cowboys that’s supposed to be coming out next year. Marty isn’t really into funny films, but Simon said that Steve Martin is in this one, and Marty laughed himself ill at the one the American made about the mad brain surgeon, even though he only understood something like half of the jokes. He remembers they watched it on video one Sunday afternoon at Simon’s place, when his parents were out at the pub. Simon likes movies; he knows an older kid who works on the local video van and gets him all the latest ones pirated for free.

Marty is more of a reader than a watcher. He loves his books. His father, of course, hates books. He thinks that only poofs read. So Marty keeps all of his novels and short story collections stashed away at the back of the cupboard, covered by some old blankets his mother was going to throw out. He loves fantasy — The Hobbit is his favourite, but he’s managed to get most of the way through The Fellowship of the Ring and he’s proud that he understands a lot of what’s going on. Some of it’s a bit tricky, and a lot of the words are new to him, but he’s plodding on as best he can, making use of his dictionary if he gets really stuck on anything.

He likes Strider. He wants to be Strider, even though he knows that it’s just a book and none of it is real. But inside his head, it’s all real: in there, where nobody else can see him, he fights orcs and dragons and kicks the crap out of his dad on a regular basis.

He opens the wardrobe and takes out a light jacket, just in case it gets cold outside later on, during their all-night vigil. He doesn’t really believe that anyone — bigger kids or roaming adults — is going to wreck what they’ve built, but that isn’t the point, not really. The reason they’re all meeting up when their parents have gone to bed is because they need to be with each other. There’s a connection between the boys that goes deeper than friendship. They are like brothers, linked by blood. Their parents don’t give a damn, so they each give a damn about the other. Together, as part of the gang, they are strong. No one can hurt them.

He sits back down on the bed and waits for his parents to stumble up to bed. They won’t be late tonight because they’ve been drinking all day. His mother uses vodka to block out the pain and pointlessness of her life, and his father chugs down gallons of beer because he wants to drown what he is.

Marty is untroubled by these insights; he has them all the time. He’s a bright boy — much more intelligent than the teachers at school are willing to believe, and probably as well-read as anyone five years older than him. But it isn’t wise to put his brains on display, so he keeps them covered by an illusion show of brute force and disinterest. He plays the game, makes sure he never gets above average marks for his schoolwork, while all the time he is reading ahead, and filling his notebooks at home with the work he does on his own.

Marty knows that this won’t get him anywhere. He is trapped here, in the Grove, just like his parents and their parents before them, but there is no reason why his mind cannot be allowed to roam free, exploring the boundaries of the world written down in books.

Before long he hears his parents climbing the stairs. His mother is giggling and his father is whispering too loudly. They’re talking about sex — or, more specifically, his father is telling his mother that tonight he’s going to ‘take her up the shitter and make her squeal’. Marty feels like crying. He barely knows these people, and has nothing in common with them apart from that they all share a house together. He’s a prisoner, like the Count of Monte Cristo. He is trapped here, in this hell, and outside the window is yet another, much larger hell. All he can see for miles and miles is variations on the same theme. Somewhere out there, the devil is waiting, and by reading and learning he is keeping him at bay.

His parents’ bedroom door shuts softly, and then he hears the clicking of the lock as they shut themselves in for the night. He closes his eyes, trying to stem the flow of tears, and then opens them again. They feel wet, prickly. He grits his teeth and grinds them together, then bites the side of his cheek. The pain takes it all away, pushing it to the side. Pain is good; it always does that.

Marty waits another few minutes, until the sounds begin. At first it’s like the grunting of pigs, and then, once the headboard starts slamming against the wall, it sounds like two animals fighting. There’s a thin line between sex and violence in his parents’ bed, and Marty knows more about the sexual act than any other ten-year-old he has ever met. He knows far too much; he knows it all. Once, when he was small, his father made Marty watch them at it. They were drunk — his mother objected at first, but a sharp punch to the kidneys put an end to that — and Marty was forced to stand there at the foot of the bed while his father pounded into his mother, smiling all the time. Smiling and grunting and repeating the words, “This is what it’s like. This is what’s it’s like.” At the time, Marty had no idea what those words meant, but now he realises that his old man was talking about the whole world. This, he was saying, is how the world works. Like it or not, it’s the most basic truth of all: some fuck, some get fucked.

Too much truth for a ten-year-old, but Marty is thankful for the information. It will make it easier to hit his dad when the time comes, to put the man on the ground and stamp on his hideous grinning face.

He stands and crosses the room, opens the window. The night air is warm, but there is the hint of a breeze, and he smiles as he feels it move against his cheek. Like fingers, reaching out to caress his skin in a way that his mother never did, not once in all the years since his birth. Marty knows. He remembers. She has never shown him a moment of physical affection… which is why he hates the fact that he loves her.

He throws one leg over the windowsill and stares out into the darkness. Sodium light stains the sky, the streets, the parked cars and the walls and roofs of the houses. Marty changes position, twists around, and carries out a hang-and-drop. He bends his knees when he lands on the ground below the window, absorbing the impact. He saw that in an army film. Kelly’s Heroes . Von Ryan’s Express . One of those great old movies Simon told him to watch on TV.

The downstairs lights are out and the curtains are drawn. He keeps low, almost crouching, as he runs across the short width of lawn and hops over the garden wall, hitting the footpath with silent feet and running fast, running quiet, until he reaches the end of the street. Once there, he pauses for breath, watching the neighbourhood. A dog is barking; it never shuts up, even during the day. The sound of a police helicopter grows louder and then, after a few seconds, fades as the chopper moves away from him over the estate.

Up at the Arcade, a burglar alarm wails. Either someone has broken in to one of the shops or a circuit breaker has tripped the alarm; it happens three or four times a week, always at least once over the weekend. Burglar alarms, car alarms… it seems like there’s always one going off somewhere on the estate, signalling to the uncaring residents of the Grove that something has happened. But no one ever comes, not one person turns the alarms off. They will, he thinks, go on forever, marking the passage of time until everyone alive now is dead. And even then they’ll continue, wailing into an uncertain future.