Boy A (27 page)

Jack crouches down with his face to the door, and presses the panic button on the pager. Three or four times he pushes it, sinking it as hard as he can. Until the end of his finger bends back and the pain shoots him off it. He starts to topple in towards the door, losing his balance. His left hand goes out automatically to hold him off it. Clutched in his white fingers is the wrong key that he’s been trying. With both palms he slides himself up the towering pus-green wood. The flashes, which are close around him now, parade how much his hand is shaking. It appears at different points around the lock, illuminated by this hateful personal strobe show. The key bounces off the lock’s metal surround, but this one fits. The door opens to let Jack fall into the hallway.
One final explosion from a long-barrelled Cannon hits his face, before he pushes the lens away and forces the threshold shut. They try and lift the letterbox. But he slams his elbow against it to keep it closed. His head collapses into the crook of the same arm. Only his will is holding them back. Jack feels like the little Dutch boy: jamming the hole that threatens to engulf his world.

After a couple of minutes he scrambles away on all fours, into the living room. He checks his mobile, surprised that there has been no response from Terry to the pager. The phone has a signal but there’s no message or missed calls. Jack picks through the menus to recall Terry’s mobile number. Panting like a grounded fox. Staring blankly at the screen, which says:
calling… calling… calling… no response
. He tries again, to the same effect. Then he tries Terry’s landline. An electronic BT lady tells him the number cannot be reached. He presses the panic button once more. But still nothing happens. Terry’s office phone at the secure unit switches straight to answer. Jack just asks Terry to phone him as soon as he can. Sure that the fear in his voice is sufficient to convey the urgency.

He refuses to believe he’s on his own, until he’s tried all of the numbers again from Kelly’s house phone. When every other combination has failed, Jack’s finger lingers over the 9 on the smudged keypad. Three short presses would bring at least some response. But what? Arrest most likely. A cell. Questioning. Sneering mouths trying to catch him out. The police might be on their way already. Their eventual arrival is inescapable. If he can’t bring Terry, there’s not much point in getting them here any quicker.

But there is a deeper, all-devouring beast, that is circling the waters of his mind. A leviathan so vast it could suck him through the gaps in its teeth. What if this is all down to Shell? What if she’s the one that’s brought them here? What if her whole disappearance was engineered to spear him?
Could she have been faking all of that? Was she laughing at him all the time? And suddenly every memory of her is skewed. There are looks in her eyes that weren’t there before, or he never registered. Smirks when his back was turned. Phone calls to papers each time he left her house. That’s why she wanted to take a photo of him, not for her purse, for the front page. It was her, he’s sure. She’s worse than dead, she was never there at all. It was only ever an act to catch him. Which means they must know about the fight. And so it’s over. His licence will be revoked. He’ll be taken back inside, without even the blanket of anonymity. Deprived of which he will have to live on protection wings. With freaks and sex cases. To be beaten at every opportunity and humiliated relentlessly.

Jack knows that he can’t take that. Not now. Not when he’s known this freedom. Which brings him inevitably back to the choice. The choice his one-time friend made among the fraggles. But which Jack would prefer to make in the comfort of his own home.

He phones Chris’ mobile; it’s turned off or engaged, which he had hoped for in a way, to ease what he has to say. It cuts straight to answer service.

‘Chris,’ he says, ‘It’s Jack. It was always Jack. The person that you knew, that’s who he was. I wish I could have told you more, I really do. Once I nearly did. But just because I couldn’t, doesn’t mean I lied to you. Only the words were ever lies, if you can understand that. Anyway, this, I guess, is goodbye.’ And he can’t help the tears which are streaking his vision and dropping to his chest, crumbling the resolution with which he had set his jaw. ‘Speak to the
Sun
, when they phone you again. Get what you can from the fuckers. There’s nothing else you can do… Except that… maybe you could try and tell them some other stuff too. Show I tried. Say I wasn’t all bad. How we saved the girl and that, and how, when I hurt that guy, I was trying to help you. They’ll
twist it all, but maybe you could try… So, sorry Chris, and like I say, goodbye.’

He wipes his nose on the sleeve of his work fleece, and then tries to clean off the snail-trail it leaves, on his trousers, as if somehow this matters. He wonders if he should leave a note for Terry. He takes the pad that in a different world reminded him to feed the cat. But he can’t find the words that he’s looking for. How can you cram fifteen years of thanks on to a sheet of faint lined note paper. In the end he writes:

Terry,
I can’t go back to being that other person. I like Jack. This seems the only way to hang on to him. Thanks for trying, anyway. I’m really sorry about this. I should have told you about all the stuff when it happened. Maybe you could have helped. It’s my fault not yours. So anyway, got to go. Keep the car if you can, it’s part of you. Thank you.

I love you.
Jack

He goes into the kitchen, where he knows Kelly keeps a stash of cooking wine. The first slug makes him gag. The screw-lid lands with a splash, safe in the sea of the sink. He takes the bottle with him to the bathroom. The cut-throat’s sitting there, folded into its handle, but still glinting: winking, in the artificial light. He lifts it and opens it, and then takes another swig. He tries the blade against his cheek, clearing away the negligible stubble of one day, and leaving a strip of sting on the unlubricated skin. Wrists are best done in the bath to avoid too much pain. But you need to put the booster on if you want that much hot water in the morning. It would make such a mess as well; house rules are courtesy and common sense. Maybe he should leave Kelly a note too?
But he’s getting tired of saying goodbye, and somehow it would devalue what he wanted Terry to know.

He folds the razor and puts it in his pocket, opens the mirrored cabinet, and runs a finger over the rows of bottles. One, broad and brown as the bouncers at a party he went to once, contains sleeping pills. And this is what Jack wants. He wants more than anything just to sleep. To leave all this. He pours a handful of the pills and knocks them back, in ones and twos, with the harsh slap of the wine. Not sure how many he will need, he pours out another lot – and then some more – necks them all. Gulps as much of the drink as he can take. But still takes the bottle with him. He wanders back to his room, and looks around it, quite satisfied. Runs his fingers over the shelves and walls, as he did the day he arrived. Then he slips his trainers off. Pairs them neatly by the wardrobe, and climbs into bed. It seems to Jack that he probably didn’t even need the tablets. Because he’s so weary of this world, he’s so exhausted by what it does to him, that he feels, when he closes his eyes, like he would never wake again anyway.

It was a day like no other. The first of the summer. The start of the holidays, holding significance even for those who hardly went to school. It meant that other kids would be around, but for
A
those old fears had been allayed. Word had shiftily spread that he was not one to be messed with anymore. He was no longer Davy Crockett, no longer a loner; he had a partner. More of a Butch and Sundance affair. And when the
sun
shone, like it did on that day, you couldn’t help but
dance
. Inside anyway, lest your friend think you soft. Actually though,
A
considered
B
to be the better Sundance, the surly dangerous one. He should be Butch Cassidy, who was handsome and popular. If you’re going to daydream, you might as well go all the way.

They started that Monday in the rec. Once a park, built by some mine-owner in a rare act of public kindness. When it had fallen into disrepair, the gardens were bulldozed and replaced with soccer pitches, swings and slides. When these fell into disrepair, they were left to it. Philanthropy had gone from Stonelee by then.

Football teams no longer trained on the field. The Stonelee side was called The Nomads, because they only played away. The posts were still up, but there was too much broken glass dug into the grass to risk a dive or a slide. Probably even to risk a ball. The swings were high and well built. Hung from the top of tough vandal-proof A-frames.
But generally you had to shin up the steep poles and unwind the gun-metal-grey chains if you wanted a go. The same sort of people who stuffed all the bog paper down the public toilets would swing them until they wrapped tight around the cross bar. Sometimes these people were
A
and
B
, wreaking vengeance for other times, when all they wanted was to shit or to swing.

Mostly though, they went to the rec for the roundabout. It was an old-fashioned, concrete-edged, fast-as-you-like roundabout. It had chipped orange paint on the steel handrails, and had smashed more teeth in than
B
’s brother. In one of its eight segments the floor had given way and been burned, or broken up for dogs to chase. If you looked down there you could see the ground spinning faster than anything you could imagine. Faster than a car could drive, faster than a bird could fly.
A
and
B
would dare each other to hold themselves down there. Pressing their cheeks or their noses so close to the ground that they could feel its breath as they span. With the other one pushing a bar at full pelt, till it ran quicker than them, away from their legs. Leaving them stranded till another pass let them jump on board. Watching the sky and riding the wind and waiting for their turn to push their face into the hole. To take their chance with the stones that would certainly shred them, and might well snap their neck if they went too far. But maybe they didn’t really understand the finality of that.

The closest
A
had seen to the end was the finish of Butch and Sundance on the telly. You knew they died. There were too many Spics for them to have killed them all. But they didn’t die in the film. They ran out there, into the square, and the volleys of gunfire echoed around them. But they were frozen. Butch and Sundance stopped just before the drop. They stayed in the still photo in his mind. Forever just about to die. But never dead. You were never sure. That’s the way to go.

When they tired of the roundabout that day, they threw stones for the ducks. Which were clever enough not to eat them, but not clever enough to give up the hope that the next splash would be a bit of bread. The boys bored before the birds: three bedraggled brown mallards. The only beasts hardy, or unlucky, or just plain dumb enough, to live among the road cones and shopping trolleys of the pond some landowner had once called a lake.

The scant few shopowners in the high street were wise to the pair. Had them logged as a brace of bandits, not even to be allowed in one at a time. Only the newly opened Cut Price Booze and General Store tolerated them. Perhaps through ignorance, not having had time to connect their visits to missing sweets. If they had an understanding of consequence they might have left him alone. It would have been nice to have one shop for the times when they actually had money. But the owner was swiftly to condemn them with the rest.

They had just been ejected when they saw her,
A
smarting with the indignity of being flung out by the collar,
B
still holding a Marathon bar like a runner’s baton. She was a girl from
A
’s class: Angela Milton, the undisputed princess of Stonelee JMI. She looked like an advert. Her teeth were as white as Colgate new minty gel. Her hair as blond as the corn in Hovis fields. Her clothes straight off the racks of Etam, Top Girl and Miss Selfridge, places that existed only in Durham City, maybe only Newcastle. Even the girls had crushes on her.

Angela was on her own that Monday, walking with the unknowing self-importance that only cats, and those who’ve seen the effect of their beauty from birth, can achieve. It was the decision of a second to follow her. Unspoken, a choice of eyes and nodded heads. She was utterly unaware of them behind her. She had always been unaware of
A
, except as something that other children hurt in attempts to impress her.

The newly installed CCTV cameras saw them, though. Observed them with unblinking eyes, as they darted from dingy alley to dirty doorway, along the straight and narrow road of the high street.

Down out of town she walked, shadowed at a distance by Butch and Sundance. She stopped at a bench, on the way to that part of the Byrne that had become the hole in the wall for the two-man Hole In The Wall Gang. They ducked behind a bank. And prone on the grass, among sun-dried dog-turds, they watched while she waited.

A
was about to suggest they give it up for something more fun, when the boy came along. They knew his face, and his floppy fine hair, though he was nameless. His dad drove a Volvo, and was connected to the Parliament or the Army. He was too old for the JMI: twelve at least, maybe thirteen, but he wouldn’t have gone there anyway. He went to a special school. Not the sort which
B
’s brother had attended, but the one at Barnard Castle, that wore purple blazers, and only came home for holidays.

The boy took Angela’s hand, in a possessive way. As if going to school in a castle gave him every right to a princess. And he led her down the slope to the Byrne, out of sight from the road.
A
and
B
crossed over and squatted in the matted shrubbery at the foot of an elm tree, to keep the two in view.

The part of the Byrne to which he’d led her might once have been picturesque. It was still less littered, and steeper, so the water’s colour cleared a bit in faster flow. Almost as soon as they sat down on the bank, he leaned across her and pressed his lips to hers. Her arms stuck out at right angles, like a scarecrow’s, as he started to kiss her. But after a few minutes wrapped around his body, in echo of what his arms did to her.
A
began to get cramp in his shins from crouching in the bushes, but he didn’t want to leave. It was entrancing, seeing them sucking this pleasure from each other.
B
, by his
side, was focused, too. As patient as he’d been when they were eel-fishing. As still as the plaster monk in the church.