Need You Dead

81 Thursday 28 April

Cleo knelt on the living-room floor encouraging Noah, who was sitting on his play mat, to touch the birds and animals on the mobile suspended above him. ‘Dog!’ she said. ‘Duck!’

Noah reached up and suddenly punched an elephant hard. It swung into a pig, making a clacking sound, and he giggled. Humphrey, asleep on his blanket, which he always dragged out of his basket, was making strange squeaking noises and twitching. Having a doggie dream, Cleo thought.

‘Humphrey!’ she said softly. ‘Humphrey, it’s OK!’

Suddenly there was a series of crashing sounds above them, like brutal overhead thunder. Noah looked up, startled. Humphrey, instantly awake, began barking loudly.

A metallic clanging sound. Another rumble of thunder.

‘Jesus!’ Cleo sprinted up the stairs and along to Bruno’s room, just as there was another shattering boom-boom-boom followed by a cataclysmic clash of cymbals, and pushed open the door.

It was Bruno, with his drum kit assembled, in full flow. He’d already explained them to her yesterday, as she had helped him unpack them, telling her very solemnly in great detail what each was called and its role. There were five black and white drums — a snare drum, a bass drum and three toms; two of them stood flat, three of them were angled towards him and had a black cross taped on them. The brand was stencilled in black on each of the cymbals. Paiste.

He was seated on a stool, in a T-shirt, tracksuit bottoms and white socks, wearing headphones, pounding away for all he was worth with the wooden sticks, and working the foot pedals for the bass drum and hi-hat cymbals. He was lost to the world, with a distant smile on his face as he nodded his head, vigorously and in deep concentration. A red and white football lay on the floor near him.

Looking around the room, Cleo saw a ring-bound notebook lying open on his bed. On it were multi-coloured squares. Red, orange, blue, green, yellow. It was headed Week ‘A’, and just below, Week ‘B’. Divided into periods, blocked days down the left were marked 1–5. She read across some of the classes: Spanish; Science; Maths; Music.

His school timetable. She was pleased and impressed he had already filled it in. Clearly he was meticulous with detail. Something he had inherited from his father, she wondered? Roy had that same methodical mind — something she realized that came with the territory of being a good detective.

He didn’t notice her.

She walked across to him, and tapped him gently.

He lifted off his headphones.

‘Bruno, you forgot to put the soft pads on! It makes quite a noise downstairs — and you’d wake your brother if he was sleeping.’

Bruno apologized and said he had forgotten and would put them on immediately.

She slipped back out and closed the door, gently — not that he would probably have heard if she had slammed it. She went back downstairs and squatted on the floor with Noah, who now seemed oblivious to the din. Humphrey was looking up at the ceiling and growling.

She stroked the dog’s head. ‘It’s OK, boy!’

Humphrey growled again.

As she played with Noah she was thinking about a book she had read, in translation, as part of her A-level literature studies at school, The Tin Drum, by the German writer Günter Grass. From what she could remember, the main character was an autistic boy called Oskar, who could only remember his childhood by getting himself into some kind of a trance by pounding on a toy tin drum.

But Bruno didn’t seem like that at all. Maybe right now, up in his room, he was dreaming he was playing in a rock band. Of a future as a rock band drummer? She looked up at the ceiling. He was drumming again without the pads on, obviously ignoring her. Even though he was two floors above her, the sound was reverberating through the house. She was going to have to take this up with Roy.

Noah put a plastic sheep into his mouth. As she pulled it out, he began to cry, then scream, reaching for it back. His screams almost drowned out the sound of the drums. Almost.

Scooping up Noah in her arms, he screamed even louder, scrabbling his hands through the air, reaching out for the sheep again.

Sitting there on the floor, with the stereo din of her son crying and her stepson above her making an increasingly demented sound with the drums, she found herself, very unmaternally, wishing she was back at work right now. She was missing what now seemed the blissful silence of the mortuary.