Six Bedrooms by Tegan Bennett Daylight Page A

Darcy.
    â€˜Nothing,’ said Noor.
    â€˜Why weren’t you answering your phone last night? I had something I really wanted to tell you.’
    He could hardly hear Noor, who was walking beside him with her head down, that mass of black hair shining in the sunlight.
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜My father said I had to study,’ she said again. Her voice was like a little tune; up, down.
    â€˜You could have emailed me.’ He’d set up a Hotmail account just so Noor could get round the Facebook ban, even when her phone was switched off.
    â€˜Dad switched off the wireless.’
    â€˜That bastard,’ said Darcy, but then stopped himself. Noor hated it when he swore. They were running late now. ‘I’ll have to tell you at lunch. Don’t sit with the girls. We’ll go over to the rocks.’
    Noor pulled her hand out of his and Darcy stood watching her as she walked away. When it came to lunchtime she had gone – someone said to the library, someone else said home, and she wasn’t answering her phone.
    Â 
    That night he took everything out of the suitcase under his bed to check it. He had toilet paper: ten rolls. He’d been taking it out of the weekly shopping, just one at a time, so his mother wouldn’t notice, for about two months. There was a cheap china shop in Kingswood where he’d bought some plates and mugs. It had beendifficult to know how or whether to store food. Baked beans he knew would last quite a while, but then he did not know if Noor liked them. Tinned tomatoes, bread-crumbs: these were the things his mother bought all the time and didn’t miss. His father had once seen him looking for the use-by date on a tin of tuna. He hadn’t said anything to Darcy, just stared, with that limitless contempt he had always available to him.
    He got up to check his email again. Still nothing. He looked again at the fruit-picking website. It looked like a five-year-old had set it up – crappy formatting, for one thing, and half the links were broken. Still, they’d answered his enquiries and it looked like it was going to be pretty easy to book in.
    He sent another email to Noor, marked it high priority, texted her again call me NOW!!!!! and looked at himself in the mirror. He was so tall now that he had to step back to see all of himself. He leant in to check his pimples. He pushed his dark hair back off his face to see how high his hairline was, the way Evan did, then swept it forward again. He let his head drop forward, tilted it, stared out from under his fringe. His phone sang and he turned and tripped over his chair trying to get to it, hitting his cheek on the edge of the desk.
    â€˜Fuuuuuck!’ He sat up, cupping both hands over his cheekbone. ‘Fuck, fuck, fucking hell!’ It hurt so muchhis eye wouldn’t stop watering. He put one hand over the eye, leant against the desk, and fumbled for the phone with the other. He read the message out of his good eye. Recharge now to win a prize. Savagely, he texted Noor again.
    After his face stopped hurting he got his suitcase out and went through it again. He got his list out of his desk and checked it. He wrapped the tins of tomatoes in t-shirts so they wouldn’t make a noise when he finally snuck out. He hefted the weight of one. If you tied a knot in the t-shirt you could kill someone with it. Or knock them out. He got up to look at himself. His cheekbone was bright red, like someone had rubbed lipstick into it. Great.
    Finally at three am he went to bed, though he couldn’t stop himself sitting up one last time to glance at the screen of his laptop, just in case Noor was pulling an all-nighter and had just then decided to take a break. When he lay down his cheek hurt if he let it touch the pillow, so he had to turn away from the laptop. Its blue light was like moonlight.
    It was past eleven when he woke up. He was still holding the phone, hot in his hand. Nothing there. He