Andrew Pyper - The Guardians

The Guardians

Andrew Pyper

First published in Great Britain in 2011

by Orion Books,

an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

Orion House, 5 Upper Saint Martin's Lane

London WC2H 9EA

An Hachette UK Company

13579 10 8642

Copyright © Andrew Pyper 2011

The moral right of Andrew Pyper to be identified as the

author of this work has been asserted in accordance with

the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

Al rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any

means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,

without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the

above publisher of this book.

Al the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to

actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library.

ISBN (Hardback) 978 1 4091 2254 8

ISBN (Trade Paperback) 978 1 4091 2255 5

Printed in Great Britain by

Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

The Orion Publishing Group's policy is to use papers that are natural,

renewable and recyclable products and made from wood grown in sustainable

forests. The logging and manufacturing processes are expected to

conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

www.orionbooks.co.uk

For my Guardians then—

Jeff, Larry, Mike, Robin, Alan

And for my Guardians now—

Heidi, Maude and Ford

MEMORY DIARY

Entry No. 1

We watched them come.

A lone police cruiser at first. The officer's shirt straining against the bulge around his waist. A look of practised boredom on his face, a pantomime of seen-it-al masculinity performed without an audience. We were the only ones who saw him walk, pigeon-toed, into the house. The only ones who knew he wouldn't be bored for long.

When he came out he wasn't wearing his cap anymore. His thin hair, grey but darkened with sweat, was a greasy sculpture of indecision, pointing in several directions at once. (Later, we wondered about the cap. Had it falen off in the first jolt of shock? Had he removed it himself in a reflex of some sort? A show of respect?)

He tumbled into the car and radioed in. We tried to read his lips, but couldn't realy see his face through the wilow boughs, swaying reflections over the windshield.

Was there a numbered code for this? Or was he forced to describe what he'd seen? Did he recognize, even in the shadows that must have left him blind after entering from the bright outside, who they were? However he put it, it would have been hard for anyone to believe. We weren't wholy convinced ourselves. And we knew it was true.

Soon, two more cruisers puled up. An ambulance. A fire truck, though there was no fire. Some of the men went inside, but most did not. A scene of grimly loitering uniforms, sipping coffee from the Styrofoam cups they brought with them. The last of history's union-protected, on-the-job smokers flicking their butts into the street in undeclared competition.

There was nothing for most of them to do, but they stayed anyway. An only partly hidden excitement in the way they scuffed their shoes over the cracked sidewalk and rested their hands on their belts, knuckling the handles of holstered guns. It was a smal town. You didn't get this sort of thing too often. You didn't get it ever.

We stood together, watching. Unseen behind the curtains in the front room of the McAuliffe house across the way. Our noses grazing the diaphanous material that smeled of recently burned bacon and, deeper stil, a succession of dinners scooped out of the deep fryer. When the paramedics and bearded man in a suit who must have been the coroner finaly emerged from the house with the black bags laid out on gurneys—one, and then the smaler other—we held our breaths. A gulp of french fry, onion ring and chicken finger that, to this day, is the taste of loss.

We remember al this, though stil not everything.

And some of the things we remember may not have happened at al.

[1]

The cal comes in the middle of the night, as the worst sort do.

The phone so close I can read the numbers on its green- glowing face, see the swirled fingerprint I'd left on its message window. A simple matter of reaching and grabbing. Yet I lie stil. It is my motor-facility impairment (as one of my fussily unhelpful physicians cals it) that pins me for eighteen rings before I manage to hook the receiver onto my chest.

"I don't even know what time it is. But it's late , isn't it?"

A familiar voice, faintly slurred, helium-pitched between laughter and sobs. Randy Toler. A friend since high school—a time that even Randy, on the phone, cals "a milion years ago." And though it was only twenty-four years, his estimate feels more accurate.

As Randy apologizes for waking me, and blathers on about how strange he feels "doing this," I am trying to think of an understanding but firm way of saying no when he finaly gets around to asking for money. He has done it before, folowing the unfairly lost auditions, the furniture-stealing girlfriends, the vodka-smoothed rough patches of his past tough-luck decade. But in the end Randy surprises me when he takes a rattling, effortful breath and says, "Ben's dead, Trev."

Trev ?

This is my first, not-quite-awake thought. Nobody's caled me that since high school, including Randy.

"How?"

"A rope," Randy says. "Rope?"

"Hanging. I mean, he hung himself. In his mom's house."

"He never went outside. Where else could he have done it?"

"I'm saying he did it in his room. Up in the attic where he'd sit by the window, you know, watching."

"Did his mom find him?"

"It was a kid walking by on the street. Looked up to see if that weird McAuliffe guy was in the window as usual, and saw him swinging there."

I'm quiet for a while after this. We both are. But there is our breath being traded back and forth down the line. Reminders that we aren't alone in recaling the details of Ben's room, a place we'd spent a quarter of our youth wasting our time in. Of how it would have looked with the grown-up Ben in it, attached to the oak beam that ran the length of the ceiling.

"Maybe it's for the best," Randy says finaly.

"Take that back."

"I didn't—it's just—"

"Take that stupid bulshit back.' '

"Fine. Sorry."

Randy has led the kind of life that has made him used to apologizing for saying the wrong thing, and the contrite tone he uses now is one I've heard after dozens of defaulted IOUs and nights spent sleeping on my sofa between stints in rented rooms. But then, in little more than a whisper, he says something else.

"You know it's sort of true, Trev."

He's right. It is sort of true that with the news of Ben McAuliffe's suicide there came, among a hundred other reactions, a shameful twinge of relief.

Ben was a friend of mine. Of ours. A best friend, though I hadn't seen him in years, and spoke to him only slightly more often. It's because he stayed behind, I suppose. In Grimshaw, our hometown, from which al of us but Ben had escaped the first chance we had. Or maybe it's because he was sick. Mentaly il, as even he caled himself, though sarcasticaly, as if his mind was the last thing wrong with him. This would be over the phone, on the rare occasions I caled. (Each time I did his mother would answer, and when I told her it was me caling her voice would rise an octave in the false hope that a good chat with an old friend might lift the dark spel that had been cast on her son.) When we spoke, neither Ben nor I pretended we would ever see each other again. We might as wel have been separated by an ocean, or an even greater barrier, as impossible to cross as the chasm between planets, as death. I had made a promise to never go back to Grimshaw, and Ben could never leave it. A pair of traps we had set for ourselves.