The Chaos (7 page)

I feel sick at the thought of it. It’s what I’m running away from. I’m never going to let anyone do that to me again. I’m not going to let it happen. I’m not …

She reaches out to me again. Her hand’s on my hair, stroking, reassuring.

‘Sure you can. Everyone gets nervous the first time, but it’s okay. Have some vodka, have some weed or whatever, you’ll be fine.’

‘No, I mean, I
can’t
… I’m pregnant.’

She sits up in the chair, starts to frown, then tips her head back and laughs.

‘Oh, Jesus! I’m losing my touch. I never even noticed. How far gone are you?’

‘I dunno.’ I sit up and smooth my top over my swollen belly.

‘Oh Christ, look at you! Five months? Six? That’s it, I’m gonna get you out of here.’

‘Won’t you get in trouble?’

‘Yeah, there’ll be trouble, but I don’t care. Even I can’t send a lamb like you to the slaughter.’

‘But no one would want to … with me … would they?’

She unwinds her legs and gets up off the sofa.

‘Oh yeah, they’d want to, all right. There are some sick
fucks out there, and Shayne knows them all. Are you sure you can’t go home?’

I shake my head. Whatever happens, however bad it gets, I’m not going back there. She comes over to me then, crouches down and puts her arms round me.

‘We’ll find you somewhere. Somewhere safe,’ she murmurs into my ear.

The doorbell rings. Meg pulls away from me, and the make-up round her eyes is smudged. She drags her finger under each eye, blinks and sniffs hard.

‘Look at me. Soft, aren’t I? This’ll be Vin. Stay here.’

She goes to the door. I hear two voices talking, hers and a man’s, for quite a long time, but I can’t hear what they’re saying. Then Meg comes back into the room.

‘This is Vinny,’ she says. ‘He says you can go with him.’

The man behind her steps forward. He’s tall and gangly, eyes bulging in his skull-like head.

I don’t know what to say, what to do. I don’t know who to trust. I thought Meg was okay. Turns out she was recruiting for a pimp. Now, who’s this?

‘It’s all right,’ Meg says, ‘he won’t hurt you. I’d trust him with my life. I
do
trust him with my life. Every day.’ They exchange a quick smile, and then she puts her arm through his and leans her head on his shoulder. ‘Sarah, he won’t hurt you. I wouldn’t do that to you.’
Wouldn’t you?

Vinny ruffles Meg’s hair, then disentangles himself from her.

‘You can stay in our squat,’ he says. ‘No strings. Nothing. Shayne won’t touch you there. No police. Nothing like that.’

‘Why? Why would you do that?’ 

He looks down at the floor, shuffles his feet a bit. 

‘Meg told me. About the baby. You need somewhere to
go – I’ve got somewhere. It’s simple.’

I’m pretty sure it’s not that simple, but I know what will happen if I stay here. Let’s face it, my options are limited. So I take a chance.

‘Okay,’ I say.

‘Are you having a drink, Vin?’ Meg asks. ‘Stay and have a drink with me.’

He looks at his watch, shakes his head.

‘Better get off, darlin’. If we’re going, we’d better go. Okay?’ he says to me.

‘Okay,’ I say.

Meg gives me another hug on the way out.

‘Take care,’ she says, and she pats my stomach. It’s the first time anyone’s done that, apart from me, patted the baby. It makes everything seem real. There’s someone growing inside me, a new person. The reality of it, what it means, makes me almost dizzy.

‘You all right?’ asks Vinny, as I stand still, swaying a little. 

‘Yeah,’ I say. I take a deep breath. ‘Yeah, I’m all right. Let’s go.’

Chapter 13: Adam

S
ometimes I think I made her up. Sarah. In my head, she’s so perfect – her face, her eyes. I close my eyes and I can feel that moment when her fingers touched my face. It’s like a dream, but it’s real. I know it’s real, because I wrote it all down as soon as I got home that day.

It’s here in my book, her number and everything else I can remember about her. She’s got a whole page to herself. I look at it every day, but it don’t help. It don’t bring her back.

It’s been weeks now since she disappeared. Nearly a month.

I go out on the streets looking for her. She’s got to be somewhere. I ought to have a picture of her, so I can show people, ask around, but I haven’t. All I’ve got is a memory.

I don’t like being where there’s lots happening. Normally I try to steer clear of people, keep my head down, avoid eye contact, but this is different. I make myself go into crowds. I move through them or I stand and watch, scanning the faces that go past. Everywhere I go, I’m being watched too.
It don’t usually take the police long to find me and move me on. And all the watching and waiting and hassle don’t bring me any closer to Sarah. They just bring me more numbers.

Everyone has a number. Everyone has a death.

Gasping, shrieking, shocks and pain; pain in my legs and arms; pain gripping my head; pain through my whole body. Metal slicing through me; a weight on my chest that’s so heavy I can’t fight it; blood flooding out of me, unstoppable; lungs that won’t work, battling for breath that won’t come. I feel all the deaths. They flash through me, leaving traces behind. Each one batters me. Each one shocks and weakens me.

I write them down, trying to let every single death or group of deaths disappear out of my mind and into my book. That used to work, but it don’t any more, and I can’t take more than a couple of hours at a time. After that, my head’s too full. I need to get away, away from other people, their stories, their ends.

‘Bloody hell, Adam, you look rough. Where’ve you been?’

As soon as I walk through the door Nan starts pecking away at me.

‘Where’ve you been? Where do you go? Who’ve you been with?’

I wish I had somewhere else to go, but this is it now. Home. Or what passes for it. A little box with two people in it who shouldn’t be together. I brush past her, head up the stairs to my room and close the door. It’s what I want, what I need – a closed door, no more faces, no more eyes, no more deaths.

I lie on my bed or I sit on the floor, but my mind’s buzzing and I’m drumming a rhythm on the bed-frame with my fingertips or my leg’s twitching, twitching, twitching. I can’t
just sit here and wait. I need to do something.

I get my book out and flick through the pages. Places and numbers and deaths. I go over and over them. And twenty-sevens everywhere. What’s going to happen here? What’s going to happen to London that’s going to kill so many people? Some places the twenty-sevens are one in every four, others one in three. How many people are there in London? Nine million? Can three million people only have ten weeks to live? Am I one of them?

The deaths are violent; broken bones and backs, heads caved in. The sorts of deaths that happen when buildings collapse, or blow up, or get hit by something.

It’s got to be something like that, ’cause if it was an illness – flu or plague or something – the deaths would be spread out, wouldn’t they? It wouldn’t all just be in a few days. And I wouldn’t feel what I feel when I see the numbers – I’d be hot and weak and exhausted. Wouldn’t I?

I get it into my head there’s a pattern, if I could just see it. A pattern in the numbers. They’re trying to tell me something. Then I get to thinking that my notebook is just the start – I could be doing things with this information. I’ve got places. I’ve got dates. I’ve got ways of dying. Maybe I could plot them on a map. I fetch Nan’s A-Z from the lounge. She pokes her head round the kitchen door when she hears me, starts to say something, but I blank her, grab the book and crash back up the stairs.

It’s only small, the A-Z, and it’s difficult to see the middle of the pages. I start with the maps showing the roads round here and tear them out. They don’t come cleanly, so when I put the pages together on my desk there are bits missing in the middle. I get my pencil case out of my bag and start working through my notebook. I start off by doing a dot for
each person, but the map’s so small that by the time I’ve put ten dots on it, it’s just a blobby mess. I know it’s rubbish, but I carry on for a bit longer, then I sit back, look at what I’ve done, put both hands on the pages, crumple them up and chuck them across the room. It’s hopeless.

My palm-net’s on the desk. That’s only small too, but I’ve used it in lessons and for homework, and it’s got tons of apps. There must be one that would help me with this. If only Mum had let me have a computer … she didn’t want the internet in the flat, see. She always said it was ‘full of lies.’ Now I realise it must have been ’cause she wanted to keep the truth from me. If I’d known about her and Dad, I could have asked so many questions. Coulda, shoulda, woulda … no point going over it now.

I pick up the palm-net, fire it up, and go and sit on the bed, propped up against my pillows. The front page comes up: ‘Welcome, Adam, to the Forest Green network. You have four assignments outstanding – for details of tasks and deadlines, click here.’ I ignore the message and start exploring the apps. There’s loads of functions, including databases. I’m sure that’s what I need. And the only way to find out is to try.

When you play around with it, it’s pretty easy. To start with, you just make a big list, with different categories. Once you’ve got that you can search or put them in a different order. I start inputting the stuff from my book. And then I stop.

‘Welcome, Adam, to the Forest Green network.’
If I’m on the school network, does that mean that everything I do on here can be seen? I can hear Mum’s voice again. 
‘You mustn’t tell. Not anyone. Not ever.’

Shit!

‘Delete all.’

Enter.

‘Are you sure you want to delete this database?’ 

Yes. Enter. 

It’s gone.

I switch the palm-net off and throw it to the end of the bed. Bloody thing. They only want us kids all connected up so they can keep tabs on us. Maybe Mum was right: better to have nothing to do with it. But I was on the right track with a database, I’m sure of it.

There’s a laptop sitting on the desk the other side of the room. Retro-looking, it must have been Dad’s. Would a sixteen-year-old computer still work? I lever myself off the bed and go over to it, wipe my sleeve across the top to get rid of the dust, open it up and press the button.

The last person to press it was Dad. Nan called him Terry. Mum called him Spider. He was fifteen the last time he did this. Had he met Mum by then? Perhaps she was here, with him, in this room.

The screen lights up and music starts blasting out of the speakers either side of it on the desk.

‘You are not alone. I am here with you …’ It’s a high, pure voice that sends a chill through me. Michael Jackson. He died the same year as my dad. Is this what he was listening to, the last time he was here? I thought he was tough, my dad, a bad boy. This is sentimental stuff, it gets to you. I close my eyes and listen to the end of the track. What would my life be like now if he was here? I wish he was here, or Mum, or someone.

I wish I wasn’t in this on my own.

Chapter 14: Sarah

T
here’s a man in my room. He’s kneeling down by my mattress – he’s got his hand on my shoulder. It’s Him, He’s here. I don’t want this any more.

I lash out and my fist makes contact with his chin. 

‘Ouf! Christ, what are you doing?’

It’s not the voice I was expecting. It’s younger, higher pitched. It sounds familiar. 

‘Sarah, it’s me. It’s Vinny.’

I can’t be at home because the bed’s on the floor, the window’s in the wrong place. And suddenly I remember Vinny leading me through the back streets and into this place, this squat, and up some stairs to the top of the house. He showed me this room; there was a mattress on the floor, nothing else, and said, ‘This can be yours, if you want it.’ I looked at the empty room – floorboards, sheet pinned up against the window – and in spite of everything, my heart lifted. My room, my space, mine.

‘Vinny,’ I say out loud. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘You were shouting out, screaming. I thought you were being murdered in your bed.’

My eyes are getting used to the light now, soft yellow streetlight coming through the gaps at the edge of the window sheet. I sit up. Vinny moves off his knees and sits with his back against the wall next to the bed.

‘You all right, then?’ he asks.

‘Nightmare,’ I say. ‘Sorry I made a noise.’

‘’S all right,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t asleep, but some of the others are. What’s it about, your nightmare?’

‘Fire,’ I say.

‘Fire and brimstone?’

‘I dunno, what’s brimstone?’

‘Not sure, the stuff you find in hell.’

‘That’s about right then, but it’s not hell, it’s here.’

‘Here?’

‘London. The city’s going to burn, and I’m in it, and the baby …’

‘That’s heavy.’

‘Mmm … there’s someone else too. He takes her away from me. He takes her into the fire.’

‘Shit.’

We sit in silence for a minute. I’m still in that zone – half-asleep, half-awake – when your dreams feel real.

‘I’ve met him,’ I say. ‘The devil in my nightmare. He’s real.’

‘Bloody ’ell.’

Vinny shuffles a bit closer and puts his arm round me. Makes me think,
Here we go; this is what he really wants. No strings? There are always strings.
I must have reacted, frozen up or something, because he moves his arm away again.

‘It’s all right,’ he says, ‘I’m not after anything.’

‘Why are you letting me stay here then? I can’t pay you.’ 

He sighs then, a long breath out into the soft, quiet air of the room and I wonder if he’s just buying some time, thinking of a good line. But when he speaks, it’s not like that. He doesn’t look at me, just stares ahead.

‘I had a sister, few years ago,’ he says. ‘She got pregnant, like you, left home. She asked for help, went to a doctor, but they turned her away. They turn everyone away now, don’t they? Unless there’s something wrong with the baby. Doesn’t matter if the girl can’t cope. Doesn’t matter if she’s desperate, like Shelley was. So she got an abortion in some back-street dive, died a few days afterwards. We never knew until the hospital rang us.’