Free The Dark Inside by Rupert Wallis Page B

square ringed with cars. On three sides were tall,
smart houses, set back from the road, with large bay windows and black railings like lines of spears. On the one open side was the fringe of a green park lit by street lights.
    Somewhere in the distance a police siren skewered the air. As it faded, a gunshot ripped through the car nearest to Billy and James, blowing out a window. Billy’s blood shuddered in the
wind of it. Something sharp caught the side of his face, and he put up a hand and felt a shard of glass lodged in his cheek like a tooth in the wrong place. His stomach turned and he looked
back.
    Webster had dropped the shotgun and was running towards them. Billy drew James closer to him, putting the pistol to the boy’s head.
    ‘Stop!’ shouted Billy. But Webster kept on coming. Mouth open. Roaring. Tongue straining at its root. Billy raised the pistol and fired into the sky. But Webster did not falter.
    Billy felt James shaking. He was shaking too. Flinging the boy to the ground, he turned and ran into the park, disappearing into the dark.
    James was a heap in the road. His head had gone off like another gunshot on striking the tarmac. Glass tumbled from his hair as Webster picked him up in his arms and carried him away from the
square. He did not stop, keeping to the small paths and alleyways. Eventually, he found a towpath and followed the canal until he came to a bridge. He laid the boy down underneath the arch and then
took off his greatcoat and wrapped him in it.
    James’s face was cut in places. Blood had dried in sticky patches. Webster ripped a corner from his shirt and used the water from the old plastic bottle in his greatcoat pocket to wipe the
boy’s face clean. After emptying the bottle, he stopped and stared at it, and squashed the sides together, and yelled and hurled it away down the path. Then he took out the small glass jar of
ointment from another pocket and ran his little finger round the inside until he had enough paste to smear across the cuts on James’s face.
    After he had finished, Webster listened for some time to the distant buzz of a helicopter, and watched the spotlight strobe back and forth over the rooftops of the town.
    Eventually, he lost interest and stared at the moon. He cursed at it under his breath until the anger in him had died down, leaving him cold and hollow inside.
    After walking back down the path, he picked up the empty bottle and observed it for some time, turning it through his fingers, before screwing the top back on.
    James stirred when Webster knelt beside him and put the bottle back in one of the pockets of the greatcoat. ‘Where are we?’ he said.
    ‘No place for a boy like you, that’s for sure,’ said Webster, staring at the black canal water. It could have been a river of blood for all he knew without some sort of light
to shine on it and see for sure.



20
    The bus tucked back its doors like a pair of wings.
    Webster stepped down on to the pavement and blinked in the sunlight. James appeared by his side. Just the two of them. A man in a dirty blue greatcoat and a boy in a black waterproof filched
from the back of a chair. They stood facing the warped reflection of themselves in the dark glass window of an office.
    ‘So,’ said Webster, ‘here we are.’
    The bus shuddered and growled as it left. Cars zipped by.
    ‘If we go to the exact spot,’ said James, ‘you might remember something.’
    Webster caught sight of a plane in the deep blue between two tall buildings. He watched it until it was gone and there was nothing left but a white trail fattening. He closed his eyes.
    ‘I wish we were somewhere else,’ he said.
    They walked until the office blocks on either side of them faded away into a vast park and then they started over a large expanse of grass, which was hard and browned from the
sun. Bodies were marooned on towels and rugs. Lifeless-looking. As if their souls had abandoned them. In the mighty distance someone was