The If Game Read online

  The If Game

  Catherine Storr

  Content

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  1

  Stephen found the keys when he was digging in the garden, something he not often did. That Saturday morning, as they walked through the weekly market, his dad had stopped at the flower stall and unexpectedly bought some plants. He had never, to Stephen’s recollection, done this before. In the afternoon, he had offered to double Stephen’s pocket money if he’d dig holes for the little rose bushes. Gardening wasn’t something that had ever interested Stephen, but he needed the money, so he agreed. It couldn’t take long, he thought, and he’d be quite pleased if the boring little plot in front of the house could have some colour in it. Fired by this thought, he bought himself a packet of sweet pea seeds, with a startlingly brilliant picture on the envelope.

  There had been a lot of rain. The earth was soft and heavy. He had dug several holes for the little bare brown stems, which didn’t look as if they would ever turn into real bushes, and he was whistling a tune he’d heard on the radio, when his spade came up against something hard. A stone probably. But there seemed to be more of it than there was of any of the smallish stones he’d found already, so he dug a little to one side, lifted out a spadeful of earth and saw what it was.

  Disappointing. Only an old key.

  No. Better than that. More than one key.

  When he’d got the objects properly on to his spade and had brushed off some of the clidgy earth, he saw a metal bar, about six inches long, rather like an outsize safety pin, on which were hung three keys of different shapes and sizes.

  It wasn’t exactly treasure, but it was a lot better than stones. He put them on the weedy path beside the holes.

  There is something special about objects you find, even if they are not very interesting in themselves. They are like unexpected presents. You feel they may have possibilities you don’t know about. Finding a coin is like this. You don’t spend it quite as you would pocket money which you’ve counted on. He was holding the keys in his hand and whistling again, when a voice from the other side of the fence, said, ‘Hi!’

  Stephen, startled, said, ‘What?’

  ‘I said, “Hi!” I can’t see you, but I know you’re there.’

  The garden next door belonged to Mr Jenkins, who was old and often ill, and who practically never left his house. Stephen had often tried to squint into his garden through holes in the fence, but he’d never been able to see more than a tangle of brambles and the thick, solid leaves of shrubs. This certainly wasn’t Mr Jenkins’s voice. It was much too young.

  ‘I can’t see you, either,’ Stephen said.

  The voice laughed. Then it said, ‘Do you live there?’

  ‘Yes. You don’t live with Mr Jenkins, do you?’

  ‘No, thank you. I’m here with my mum. Just visiting.’

  ‘Visiting Mr Jenkins?’

  ‘He’s my mum’s uncle. That’s why.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Alex.’

  So it was a boy. Good.

  ‘What’s yours?’ the voice was saying.

  ‘Stephen.’

  ‘Do you live there with your mum and dad?’

  ‘With my dad.’

  ‘Haven’t you got a mum?’

  Stephen said, ‘No,’ rather roughly. He hated being asked this question and had never found the right reply.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the voice. Then it changed and said, ‘Sorry! I’ve got to go. Someone’s calling me.’ There was a rustle and the sound of twigs snapping. A door slammed. Then silence. Stephen wished he could have seen this Alex. He had quite liked the boy’s voice and he had often wished that there was someone living next door who would be more interesting and more fun for him than old Mr Jenkins. He rather hoped that this Alex would come visiting his mum’s uncle again. He might invite him into his garden or the house, and then he’d see if he wanted him for a friend.

  The questions had made him think about his mum. He had got more or less used at school to fending off questions about her. Sometimes he said, ‘She’s dead,’ which shut people up quickest. Sometimes he said, ‘I don’t have a mum. I can’t even remember her.’ If the questions went on after that, he would walk away. Once, Tim Gatley, who was inclined to bully, had gone on and on with stupid questions—‘Where had his mum gone?’ ‘Had she gone off with another bloke?’ ‘How old had he been when she left?’ Finally, Stephen had lashed out and they had had a sort of fight. They had both got bloody noses and sore knees from falling on the asphalt playground, and no one had either lost or won, but from that day Tim hadn’t asked any more. Stephen had always had a reputation for a quick temper, and this incident made people even less willing to provoke him.

  It was fortunate, Stephen thought, that there were so many people in the school who had single parents. His having only a dad didn’t make him peculiar, except for the fact that most of the other singles were mums rather than dads. What did make him different from the rest was that he didn’t know anything about his mum. He wasn’t even sure that she was dead. When he’d been younger and had asked his dad about her, he’d just been told that she had gone when he was very small, and wouldn’t be coming back. ‘Did she die?’ he had asked, and his dad had said, ‘Yes. In a way she’s dead.’

  At the time, Stephen had taken this to mean that his dad thought they might meet her again in heaven. When he thought about it now, that did not seem a likely explanation, because as far as he knew his dad didn’t believe in heaven. But perhaps he did. He never talked about it. He had ended that conversation by saying, ‘I don’t want to talk about her, Stephen. Don’t ask any more.’ So he hadn’t asked any more. But that was a long time ago. Now that he was growing up, had left primary school and started in the comprehensive, he began to think that he had a right to be told exactly what had happened to her. But it was difficult to start asking again.

  While he was thinking this, he had gone indoors, where he washed his find and his black hands. The keys clanked against the side of the sink. He had to scrub them with the vegetable brush to get the encrusted earth out of the patterns on the handles and the flanges.

  ‘What’s that?’ his dad asked.

  ‘What’s what?’

  ‘Something went clink.’

  ‘I found it in the garden. It’s only some old keys,’ Stephen said.

  ‘What like?’ Dad did not sound particularly interested.

  Stephen considered, ‘One of them’s quite big. Got a loop on top.’

  ‘Not one of ours then?’

  ‘Don’t think so.’

  ‘If they’re no use, get rid of them.’

  ‘But they might come in useful.’

  ‘What’s a lot of old keys useful for if they don’t fit anywhere?’

  Stephen said, ‘Don’t know.’

  But any key, however old, must once have had a lock it fitted. He couldn’t make up his mind to throw them out just like that. When his hands and the keys were almost dry, he examined them more closely. The largest and most impressive was heavy and solid, made of some metal which he guessed might be brass. It had a square top, pierced with a larg
e hole by which it hung from the metal bar. This top was decorated with what Stephen thought of as squiggles. The stem was ribbed and went down to the flange at the bottom, which was cut into a sort of pattern. It was a handsome piece, and after Stephen had rubbed it with a soft cloth dipped into his dad’s metal cleaning tin, it sprang to golden life, shining in the late winter sun as if it had been of gold. Stephen admired it. He wondered what sort of door this key would open. He’d have liked to imagine that it belonged to the gate of a castle. It looked important enough for that.

  The second largest key was quite different. It was dark and long and lean, with a smallish loop at its top and a much simpler pattern below. A mean key, he thought, for use, and not for show. Stephen tried polishing it, but it remained black and unpromising. A key for any ordinary door or a shed. He went round the flat trying it in all the keyholes he could find. It was too large for any of the room doors. It did go into the door of the cupboard in the passage, but when Stephen tried to turn it, it got stuck. He had some difficulty getting it out. It was gigantic compared to the locks on the bathroom cabinet and the top drawer of the little chest where his dad kept an assortment of odds and ends. On the rare occasions when this drawer was unlocked and Stephen had looked in, he had seen nothing very interesting. Some very old cigarette cards, a bundle of letters tied in a piece of string, what looked like a photograph album, and a lot of clippings from old newspapers. It had puzzled him that his dad kept the drawer locked. Nothing else in the house was locked, but what he had seen hadn’t made him want to examine the drawer’s contents more closely.

  The third key was an ordinary looking Yale key. But whereas most Yale keys have only one hole in the top, this one had two holes, so that he could imagine it looked up at him out of the kitchen sink like a wicked little shiny face. He thought that Yale keys were boring. This one could have been made for any old door. He took it down to the front door of the house, to make sure it didn’t fit there, and it didn’t.

  It seemed that the keys he had found didn’t fit anything. Stephen knew that he ought to throw them away. His dad was always complaining of the junk he hoarded, mostly in cardboard boxes, but he couldn’t make up his mind to put the keys in the rubbish bin, just in case. He might, one day, find a use for them. And, anyway, he really liked the big one, with its considerable weight, and its solid top. He could imagine it as one of a bunch of keys worn by—whom? The keeper of a castle? He would have liked to think it was old enough for that. Perhaps it had belonged to a very important man, who had all sorts of secret cupboards and places he had to lock up at night. He liked, too, the little fiddly bits at the end of the key that went into the lock. They looked like a puzzle, perhaps a maze.

  He wondered where the keys had come from. How had they come to be buried in the small front garden? He wished he knew their histories, what doors they had opened in the past. He would have liked to get his dad to join him in speculating about them. But Dad didn’t like that sort of game. When Stephen said, as he occasionally did, ‘What would you do if we won the lottery?’ his answer was generally, ‘We’d never win, even if I was stupid enough to go in for it.’ And when Stephen, much younger, had asked, ‘What would you wish for if you had a magic stone that gave you any wish you wanted?’ Dad had said ‘I’d wish for you to stop asking fool questions.’

  So his fantasies would have to be private.

  Back in the kitchen, his dad said, ‘Still trying out those keys?’

  ‘None of them fit anywhere.’

  ‘You collecting keys or something?’ his father asked.

  ‘Not particularly. Why?’

  ‘So? It’d be better than butterflies.’

  Stephen sulked. He had once, years ago, thought of collecting butterflies, but after a disastrous experiment with a cabbage white and a really lovely Red Admiral, which made him sick to remember, he had given it up. He could still remember that miserable creature with spoiled wings and a writhing black body which had marked the end to the collection. He had never wanted to try keeping anything live again.

  He thought now that perhaps a collection of keys would be possible. He wondered if, perhaps, in a year or two, he would be showing one to an expert, who would say, ‘How much did you say you paid for this one? Well, you made a good investment that day. This is one of the very few keys made by . . .’ some unpronounceable name ‘. . . and very collectable today. You should insure it for not less than a thousand pounds.’

  But, of course, nothing like that would happen.

  Stephen thought that if this was the beginning of a proper collection, he should keep his keys in a special place. He would have liked a wooden box with compartments inside. Or, better still, a little chest of tiny drawers. Specimen Chests, they were called. But he hadn’t a hope of getting either of those. For want of anything better, he found an old chutney jar with a wide mouth, filled with odds and ends. Trinkets from crackers, half a packet of matches, a whistle that didn’t work, a single earring he’d found at school. He emptied them out and, with rare courage, threw them away. Then he made a label saying KEYS and stuck it on the side of the jar.

  2

  It was a week or two later that the extraordinary thing happened.

  It was another Sunday. They’d had their Sunday dinner and Stephen’s dad had sat down to watch television. Stephen watched too, for five minutes. Then he lost interest and saw that Dad had too, because his eyes kept closing and soon he had started a gentle snore. Stephen thought perhaps he’d go round to see if Mike was home. They could kick a football around in Mike’s garden, which was a lot bigger than Stephen’s.

  When he found that Mike was out, he was annoyed, and not sure what to do next. He’d have to fill in a lot of time before it began to get dark and he could go home for supper. Then he thought of something he’d been meaning to do for months. He would go to Bridge Street, which was more or less on his way home. Bridge Street backed on to the local railway line, and ended at the railway bridge. It ended in a sharp point, so that the last house in the row must be shaped like a triangle, if, indeed, it had any inside at all. Stephen had an idea that the front of the house, which was just like all the others in the street, wasn’t real. He meant, by this, that it wasn’t a real house, but was no more than a screen of bricks and pretend windows. A fraud, a forgery, a flim-flam.

  Somehow he found this a slightly frightening idea. He didn’t like things that looked solid and real and were disguised to hide the fact that they were not. They reminded him of an old historical story he’d read, in which a husband had wanted to get rid of his wife. He had opened the bolts of a trapdoor above a deep shaft in their castle. She had stepped on what she had supposed would be firm ground, and it had given way under her feet and precipitated her down to her death. An oubliette, the device was called, and Stephen never trod on one of those bolted wooden doors set into pavements outside pubs without remembering her and feeling unsafe himself. He felt as if this sham house might conceal the same sort of horror.

  When he reached Bridge Street he looked at the front of this house, Number One, with a mixture of fascination and doubt. It could be real. He wished someone would look out of one of the windows, so that he could be sure. But the more he looked, the more it seemed impossible that anyone lived there. The glass in those windows didn’t shine in the sun and it was so dim that you couldn’t see if there were curtains behind the glass. His eyes fell to the front door, which had been painted when the doors of the sister houses had been painted, but the paint on Number One was dirtier than the others, and the brass knocker had not been polished for years.

  As he looked at it, he was overcome by an extraordinary feeling. His heart seemed to give a hop, then to miss a beat, then to knock urgently on his chest wall. At the same time, he felt muzzy. Everything around him seemed to be moving faster than he could understand. He wondered if he could be going to faint. Was this what fainting felt like? Then it passed, and he was standing steadily on the opposite side of the road and gazing at the
door. He knew, without a shade of doubt, that he had to go through that door. There was no reason in the feeling, but it was as compulsive as the need to drink when you are parched, or the impulse to hit back if someone attacks you. He crossed over so that he was at the bottom of the three shallow steps leading up to the door. Now he saw that it had a large keyhole. A huge keyhole, like a mouth open to swallow something. He was sure that it was waiting for his key.

  He stood there for some time before he turned and went home. Luckily Dad must still be asleep. No voice challenged him as he went across the passage to his room. He took the big key out of the jar and put it in his pocket. Then he began the return journey. He wanted to hurry, as if the big keyhole in the door might disappear. It was when he turned into Bridge Street that he saw the boy.

  He was a boy of about his own age, with brown hair, worn rather long, in shabby jeans and an amazing shirt, bright turquoise coloured, with yellow dragons. The sort of shirt Stephen might have admired in a shop window, but which he’d never have had the courage to wear.

  When the boy spoke to him, he was surprised. ‘Hi!’ the boy said.

  Stephen said ‘Hi!’ too, though he didn’t like being spoken to by this stranger.

  ‘You’re Stephen,’ the boy said.

  ‘So what?’

  ‘I’m Alex. Remember? You were in your garden. Weeks ago. We talked through the fence. I was there with my mum. We were visiting her uncle.’

  Stephen did remember. ‘How did you know me?’

  ‘You came out of next door. And you were whistling the same tune.’

  ‘Holmes, you are wonderful,’ Stephen said.

  The boy said, ‘I wouldn’t want to be Sherlock. I’d be Mycroft.’

  ‘Mycroft?’

  ‘He was Sherlock’s brother who was cleverer than Sherlock.’

  ‘But you’re not either one of them,’ Stephen said, and thought he sounded just like his dad, squashing any sort of play of the imagination.

  ‘I know I’m not. But it doesn’t hurt anyone if I think about what I’d be like if things were different. I mean, if I was very rich or one of those people who are brilliant at something like tennis.’