Hello Darkness Read Online Free PDF Page B

truth of Chinatown: you take something away, you leave something behind. And you never know who’s going to get the best of the bargain.
    I sat on a bench and put my collar up against the cold wind. Then I fished around inside my brain, hoping to pull out a good one. My only lead had been the chopsticks, but it had melted like a prawn cracker on my tongue. Ling Mei had nothing to do with this, and she couldn’t help me train a spotlight on the perp.
    What did that leave?
    A football rolled towards the bench. I punted it back to the players, without getting up.
    Nothing.
    No, not nothing. I still had a pocket full of stick insects, and I knew where they had come from. I got up and walked back to the main school building.
    “Where you going?”
    A hand was on my chest, pushing me back.
    “I’m doing a job for the Shank.”
    “If you mean ‘Mr Shankley’, say Mr Shankley.”
    There were two prefects on duty at all the doors. These two punks were just going through the motions. One had fat lips and goofy teeth and looked like he was auditioning for the role of Village Idiot. The other, the talker, stank of cheap cigarettes and urine.
Cheap
urine. He’d obviously just dipped into the Interzone for a smoke, and maybe sat in a puddle of something unpleasant. Maybe he’d brought his own puddle with him.
    I pulled the Warrant out of my pocket and shoved it in the prefect’s face.
    “Tell it to the Chief,” I said, and walked through them like they weren’t there.
    I trudged up the stairs and along corridors ripe with the tang of unwashed kids, until I reached the science department.
    I looked through the toughened glass window of the biology lab. Mrs Maurice was right there at her desk. She looked like she was marking papers. Her hair was up and she had on her reading glasses. There was a cardigan draped over her shoulders and a pencil in her mouth. Only the shiny apple was missing to complete the picture of the perfect schoolmistress.
    But the image was as misleading as a party hat on a panther. Mrs Maurice was deadly, and I gulped twice before I knocked on that door.
    “Come,” she said, without looking up. I knew why she did that, and it had nothing to do with her being engrossed in the biology paper she was marking. You see, Mrs Maurice looking up was a thing to behold, a thing of rehearsed, theatrical accomplishment that could be almost operatic in its impact. And she wasn’t going to waste it until her audience had settled.
    So, it wasn’t until I was in the room that she put down her pencil and slowly unfurled herself. In one sinuous, silky movement, she slid off her glasses and shook out her lustrous hair. As her face rose, she slowly opened those huge, dark eyes. So slowly, in fact, you’d think they’d never get there. And in a way you’d be right, because her eyes always did look as if they were in the act of closing again, as if she was in the first dreamy stages of a kiss.
    And if you think that all makes Mrs Maurice sound like a honey, you’d be right. And dead
wrong
.
    Despite the fact that she had the power to make the world see her in soft focus, there were moments when you got a glimpse of reality. If she waited a little too long in between Botox injections, the lines around her mouth and eyes would reappear. At the end of a long day, her skin would lose its lustre and her eyes their depth. And one girl swore blind that she’d once seen a millimetre of a grey hair that was almost white at the roots.
    That girl might have been lying, but even if it were true, Mrs Maurice was still an awful lot of woman for one kid to handle.
    “Hello,
Johnny
,” she said, making my name sound slightly obscene, the way she always did. I’d been in her class a couple of years before and she knew me pretty well. “It’s been such an awfully long time since I had you up in my lab.”
    I coughed. I blushed. I coughed and blushed some more.
    “I’m here on business,” I said. Actually, what I said was “I’m