Foxes (2 page)

The other boys crowded around him laugh. I haven’t looked close enough to see if I recognize any of them.

Fuck off
,
Dieter
, I think miserably. It’s one thing to have your heart behaving erratically for someone who’s not even in the same realm as you, never mind the same league, and who’ll have forgotten you exist the moment you walk away, but it’s quite another to be ridiculed in front of them.

“How much?” Micky says to me. It pleases me that he ignores Dieter and doesn’t seem worried I’m going to steal his phone.

I shrug and shake my head. I barter mostly. I don’t really do money. We’ll trade what he thinks it’s worth.

Micky frowns. “When will it be ready?”

“Tomorrow,” I say mostly to the ground. “Bridge Street Café.”

“Okay.”

I turn away, desperate to get away from them. I’ve lost sight of my shark, but I’ll head down toward the embankment anyway. Away from fucking Dieter and his little crowd.

“Wait. What time?” Micky calls.

American. His accent is definitely American.

“Noon,” I say, suddenly wishing I was a cowboy with a deep voice and a sweet twang in my accent like his.

I RUN
for the tree line and only stop once I reach the river. Leaning over the wall of the embankment, I watch the way the dark water rolls in thick waves, as smooth and powerful as muscles. I look around, but there is no sign of my shark. I’m on my own.

Taking a run up, I jump onto the sloping embankment wall. I have no grace, but I’m as quick and light on my feet as a cat. Holding my arms out wide for balance, I walk along, listening to the gentle swoosh of the river, the clatter of a last train heading west, the endless growl of London traffic. It’s weird to think it, but it’s kind of peaceful, familiar. I know it’s not safe out here—nowhere is safe—but sometimes I think this is home. It’s all I’ve known for so long now.

For close on five minutes, the pain in my heart is survivable.

MY SHELL
is in an abandoned swimming pool at the edge of a common, south of the river. From the outside, the building looks derelict and falling down, but apart from the mess of torn-up tiles in the empty pool itself, it’s pretty fine.

I’ve been living here for almost a year now. I sleep in the echoey shower room where a toilet in one of the cubicles still flushes. I blocked up the other toilets with stones so that the place doesn’t stink of the sewer. The water still works in one of the sinks too. Obviously the boiler doesn’t still work, so in winter I wrap newspaper around the pipes so the water won’t freeze inside them. Every shower I take with the panfuls of mostly icy water, I imagine I’m swimming in a tropical turquoise sea, the sun a fireball above me. It works. Mostly. My imagination is probably my best feature.

My bed is a large cardboard box—the sort that might have once carried a me-sized fridge—filled with blankets I’ve collected. The fleecy ones are the softest and my favorites. Dashiel gave them to me to keep warm last winter when I had no place to sleep as safe as this. I have no idea where he got them.

I’m not the only one who lives in the swimming pool. Milo, a vet, lives in one of the vast rooms that used to be the old turkish baths. We keep an eye on each other, sort of. Other people come and go, but we have the best spaces. Everywhere else is too open and broken and cold, so we’re the only ones living here permanently.

When I found this place, I fixed a dozen locks to the heavy door to my shower room. I fixed Milo some locks on his door too, mostly so he would be happy to let me stay. He was here first, after all.

I’m safe here. Safe enough to sleep without the constant fear I’m going to be jumped. For a long time, that was all I wanted to be able to do—to sleep without being so desperately afraid all the time.

Safety and warmth. What else do people need? Maybe a little food, clean water. A friend? I don’t know. You’ve got to accept what you’ve got sometimes, I think. There is a limit, isn’t there? And for a little while, I was happy. With Dashiel, I was happy. I can hold on to that.

IN THE
warm cocoon of my blanket bed late the next morning, I go over the notes I made last night: the two sharks I followed, the boy that went with one, Micky….

My heart beats faster.

He doesn’t look like a “Micky.” The name doesn’t immediately suit him. I’m not sure why I think that.

Trying to focus on something else, I draw a clear map of my route, marking in red the times I waited in each place and the times the sharks were there, but my mind keeps returning to the bus shelter like it’s an important clue. Which it’s not. It’s just hormones. Stupid, stupid hormones.

Frustrated with myself, I reread my description of Micky—again. My descriptions are supposed to be plain and objective, but it’s part list, part wishful thinking: long legs, blond, pretty, androgynous, too much makeup, American, high or hungry(?), injured, younger or older than me—not sure—and hopefully not good friends with Dieter.

I’ve got more important things to think about—like sharks, like Dashiel. I should be making plans and figuring stuff out. My list of sharks needs to be comprehensive, their movements documented. It’s the only way the police will take me seriously and look into this, because at the moment this case is going nowhere. No one knows Dashiel’s last name. No one knows if he had any relatives or where he was from. Those are not questions we ask one another out here, and what do the police care about some rent boy no one can formally identify?

They’re not even asking for witnesses on the streets anymore, and there hasn’t been an arrest. The murder wasn’t even in the papers or in the news—no one made a big deal about it. No one cares. No one but the people who don’t matter, like me. It’s like Dashiel never existed in the wider world, and I can’t live with that.

So I can’t write stupid notes and daydream about boys who make my heart beat faster. Boys I don’t know and who I’ll never know.

I put the pad down and picture Dashiel’s smiling face. He was always smiling. I find it hard to visualize him selling himself on the streets, mostly because I never saw him do that. When he took me with him, it was never on the nights he was working. I imagine Dashiel as the boy I watched last night. I imagine that nameless shark as his killer. I imagine him not wanting to die and crying in fear and pain when it happened. I go too far. I make it hurt so bad, I just want to pull the covers over my head, hold my breath, and shut everything out forever.

I can’t do that again.

It didn’t make me feel any better. It didn’t help. It didn’t fix anything.

It didn’t make any of this right.

Shoving my blankets off, I force myself to get up. The only reason I think my body responds is because somehow I got up yesterday, and however hard it was, I know I can do it again.

Yesterday Milo sat outside my door and talked to me. Nonsense, mostly. But at one point he said he was worried because he hadn’t seen me in a while. He kept chattering on and on at me until I got up, banged on the door, and told him to go away. Before he went, he told me that what I needed to do was keep breathing, keep moving, keep eating. In that order. And I needed to find a way to let Dashiel go. Well, I’m doing the first three, but that last one isn’t ever going to happen.

THE MORNING
sun fills the shower cubicles. With all my blankets draped around me, I watch the patterns of light as they move across the room. The tiles covering the walls are so blue I feel as though I’m underwater.

Standing on tiptoes, I open one of the high windows, shocked by the cold and how white the world is, how the snow covers everything and takes all the sharp edges away.

I let the cold fresh air circulate the room, drinking hot water from the kettle I can now boil on my camping stove—thanks to the half-empty gas canister I traded my coat for—to keep warm.

IT DOESN’T
take long to fix Micky’s phone. With my blankets still tucked around my naked shoulders, I lay out my tools and spare phones on the cold white floor.

The screen I use isn’t a perfect fit. It’s from a replica, and the corners are a little sharper, but you can’t see the gaps unless you look very closely. I turn the phone on to check it works.

It’s still charged. Micky’s unlock code is 1212. It’s the second one I try. It’s so obvious it feels as though he
wants
people to unlock his phone and discover all his secrets.

When people hand over their phones for me to fix, I don’t always intend to be nosy, but sometimes if their unlock codes are easy to work out, a little poking around is too hard to resist.

I look to see if he has any photos. I can’t seem to help myself. After I’ve scrolled through the fourth photo of Micky with the same sweet, genuinely happy smile as he hugs one friend after another at a party in what looks like a warehouse, and five more photos of Micky kissing different boys’ cheeks at the same party, I turn the phone off and tuck it away in the deep pocket of my hooded top. I won’t touch it again until I’m ready to get dressed and go out.

I don’t usually feel guilty about this sort of stuff. Dashiel always told me being hyperaware of the people you deal with, knowing their secrets, can keep you alive out here, but I feel as though I have failed myself. I feel as though I’ve broken Micky’s trust.

“WHAT’S YOUR
real name? Because I don’t believe it’s Loki,” Micky says, pulling out the chair opposite and sitting down.

He looks different without all his makeup on. His eyes are as blue and bright as the winter sky, his hair more gold than white blond. It shines in the light.

My heart beats faster and faster.

I look away.

The clock on the café wall says noon exactly. If a bell were to chime the hour, it would be chiming now. He could not be more punctual. I’m still shocked he managed to sneak up on me.

The café is always busy and big enough that if I sit tucked away in a corner, no one usually bothers me, however many hours I spend pretending I’m drinking an endless cup of tea. But today I came in early and even waited for a woman and her kid to leave so I could sit in the window and see Micky before he saw me. Somehow he snuck in under my radar anyway.

“Loki’s okay.” I shrug. I’m not sure why I don’t want to tell him my real name.

Maybe I do it because I think the mystery might intrigue him. God, I’m pathetic.

“Only if you’re an evil supervillain,” he says.

“Loki’s not evil.”

“Just misunderstood?” Micky smiles, eyebrow raised.

My brain is scrambled eggs. I take a deep breath.

“Don’t have right screen, need to get another. Be tomorrow.”

I don’t look at him. He’d probably see right through me if I did.

Inside I’m at war. I shouldn’t be doing this. I’m not usually so completely dishonest, but I want to find some photos where he doesn’t have all the eye makeup on. Where he looks like he does now.

I feel so weak.

“Oh,” Micky says. He’s disappointed, but he quickly brightens. “That’s okay. I’m working tonight, but I’m sure one of the others will lend me their phone if a punter wants to go somewhere.” He rolls his shoulders back as though he’s shrugging off any problems.

Fuck.
I didn’t think of that. I chew my lip.

Micky lays his hand on the table. His fingers are long and bony, his hands bigger than his thin frame suggests they should be. He bites his nails. The wrist he grazed last night has a bandage on it, but the bandage doesn’t look very clean. It looks like it’s a piece of fabric he found and wrapped around his wrist only because he couldn’t find anything else. I wonder why he fainted and hurt it in the first place. I wonder if he fainted at all. Maybe someone hurt him. A shark? Or just a punter who got overexcited?

“You can have my phone,” I say.

Micky shakes his head. “You don’t know me. What about if your friends call you?”

“It’s fine.” I take my phone out of my pocket and hand it to him. I don’t tell him there is no one who would call me anymore. That Dashiel was the only one who ever did and he can’t call me now from wherever he is. Even though I’ve kinda hoped more than once for it to ring and his name be the one on the screen. Even though I know that’s completely crazy.

“Wow,” Micky says. He smiles as he turns the phone in his hands.

My phone is a Frankenstein. But it works fine—better than fine, actually—and I like that it’s made from the parts of about five other phones soldered together. Someone traded me a soldering set once for fixing a broken DS screen. I played around with the set constantly until it broke.

Micky’s whole attention is focused on my phone so I risk letting myself look at him a bit more closely. His mouth is wide and his smile big. I like how his teeth are very white. His incisors are quite long—making him look a little bit more masculine than he did last night, and also slightly feral. Like a fox. My heart has been beating too fast the whole time he’s been sitting down, but now warmth pools in my gut, swirling tendrils of desire, and I feel like the most pathetic person on the planet.

People like me don’t get lucky with guys like him. People like me don’t get lucky, full stop.

He catches my eye and I blush like there is a fire inside me and lower my head.

“This phone is like a piece of art,” he says. “Are you sure about me borrowing it?”

I nod. It’s the least I can do after lying to him about his own phone.
I am such a fucking lowlife.

“So tomorrow, here, noon?”

I nod again. I expect him to go now. But he doesn’t.

“What’s a shark hunter?” he asks.

His question makes me panic. I have to look up, and when I do I realize I’ve left my stupid notepad on the table. I grab it with shaking hands and shove it in my pocket, next to Micky’s phone.

“I’m a shark hunter,” I mumble.

I say it so he doesn’t think I’m weird, carrying a pad around with “Shark Hunter” written on it in big blocky letters and a few badly drawn sharks circling the page, like I’m a kid writing a story. Then I realize it makes me sound even weirder.