by Amy Lloyd
‘All right, chill the fuck out,’ he says. I see him look at the roach and it’s like he’s realising for the first time that it isn’t supposed to be wet.
‘Mouthing off about kicking the shit out of people. Why don’t you learn to mind your own fucking business before you start poking your nose into other people’s?’
I can hear the squeak of barely contained laughter but someone pipes up, ‘All right, take it easy on him, Tanker.’
‘Fine,’ I say. Slimy squirms away with his joint and I stare hard into the laptop, looking at her face and feeling something between love and hate, blaming her for all of it, all of this.
Where is she now? Is she happy? Does she have to live like this? Surrounded by people who would kill her if they knew who she was?
I open Google and I type in Dr Evelyn Isherwood, psychiatrist. It’s there instantly, her new business address and the opening hours. Closed for the day but back open at 9 a.m. tomorrow. I take my phone out of my pocket and dismiss all the notifications. I write down the address and the phone number and save them. I click on the Google Maps link and switch to Street View. It’s a nice clinic. Not as nice as the old one but, still. I zoom out and out again, looking at the town and its streets, knowing she is there, somewhere.
Right now it’s a mess but I’ll find her.
12
Her: Now
The security guard puts a hand on my lower back as we walk back to the staff room together. I look at his name tag, lined up perfectly straight against the top of his pocket. ‘Jack’, it says. I wonder if he already knows what I have done, if he has watched me on CCTV.
In the staff room Jack asks for my bag, looking me up and down. I hesitate, hoping that something will happen that will make all this go away.
‘Come on then,’ he says after a while.
I hand over the bag, too ashamed to look at him but I can hear him pause as his hand reaches around inside. When I look up Jack is holding the bra, moving the lace between his finger and thumb.
‘I …’ I say.
Then Jack pinches the price tag and smiles.
Suddenly he drops it, zips up the bag and passes it back to me. He winks. ‘I’ll walk you back out,’ he says, holding the door for me.
‘Thanks,’ I say. I wonder if it’s a trick, if he needs me to walk out of the store with it before he can say I’ve stolen it.
We walk in silence until we reach the automatic doors and then I hesitate, waiting for him to set off an alarm or something.
‘So,’ he says. He’s smiling and his eyes are shining with something. ‘You’re not gonna mug me off, are you?’
‘What?’ I say.
‘I’ve done you a favour,’ he says. ‘I know you didn’t buy that. I don’t care. Why don’t you let me take you out?’
‘Where?’ I say. I don’t know what he means and I’m sure it isn’t what I’m thinking because why would he want to take me out on a date?
‘I don’t know. Cinema, Nando’s, drinks. Come on then, let me have your number and you can choose where we go.’
A date. I look at him; he’s much thinner than the other security guards. He has thick eyebrows and dark brown eyes.
‘I don’t know my number off by heart,’ I say.
‘Get your phone out then!’
‘I don’t have it with me,’ I say.
‘You’re mugging me off,’ he says but he’s still smiling. ‘Who doesn’t have their phone with them all the time?’
I shrug. ‘I forgot it. Why don’t you give me your number?’
Jack goes to the Customer Services desk and rips off a bit of the till roll and writes his number down for me. I fold it and put it in my bag.
‘You’d better phone me,’ he says. He points at me and narrows his eyes and as he walks away he laughs.
On the bus I look at the number and try to work things out. Jack is OK-looking but I don’t think he is really my type. Actually, maybe I don’t really have a type. But there is something missing and I know from the past that men like Jack don’t fill the gap inside me.
Instead of getting off at the home I stay on until the bus loops back around town and then I get off near the library. Inside I sign up for a library card and wait for a computer to become available. I have an email address that they set up for me when I left the unit but I have to get my address book out of my bag to remind myself of the password. Then I send Dr Isherwood an email telling her that after thinking things over I’ve decided it would be best to have a phone after all.
There’s still a lot of time left for me to use the computer so I search again for news about Sean and me and then I scroll down to the comments sections to read about how much people hate us. Back in the unit there were girls who cut their arms with razors unscrewed from pencil sharpeners, Stanley knives, broken glass. Anything they could open their skin with. Whenever I wanted to hurt myself I would read about the case. The words slice deep wounds and afterwards I feel invincible because I have hurt so much that now I am numb.
An email comes back from Dr Isherwood.
Absolutely! Will sort this for you by next week. Leave it to me.
Sent from my iPhone.
Next week is too long to wait but I can’t push her without making it seem suspicious. I will have to call Jack some other way.
I think of how suspicious Jack was because I didn’t have a phone, the way that normal people can tell that there is something wrong with me because I don’t have all the things that make a whole person.
They can give you an identity but they can’t give you a life. There is so much missing: no family photos, no school friends, no restaurant reviews or old email addresses or ex-colleagues or love letters or clothes that need to be taken to the charity shop. You are brand new and lack all the clutter that makes a person real. No past.
Then there’s something else, something besides all the lack of physical evidence I exist. It’s like if you painted a perfect copy of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, even if it was completely identical to the real one, no one would want it. It isn’t about how it looks, it’s about how it got there. I think about the things people love, about the books and paintings and music, and how the artists tear off a piece of themselves and leave it in there – and that’s what a soul is, that’s how you can tell that something is real. And that’s what people know is missing from me. There’s a space inside me where a life should have been and it shows.
I turn off the computer and collect my bag while trying not to cry. The thing is, I can remember what it was like to be me and to have a person who saw into the tangled-up mess that I was, and still loved me back. But if all of that led to what happened, then what kind of person does that really make me?
13
Her: Then
Summer is nearly over already. Only one more week and then we have to go back to school. I will be in year four because I am eight now and that means I have a new teacher and a new classroom. I will miss my old classroom, where we could see the park from the window, and my old teacher. I wish things didn’t have to change.
I want to ask Sean if he will still speak to me when school starts or if he is only my friend because it’s summer but I don’t. My cider lolly drips down my hand and I lick the juice off.
‘Look,’ Sean says. He puts his whole mouth over the lolly and pushes it back and forth.
‘What?’ I say. I don’t get it. I hate it when I don’t get it.
‘I’m doing a blow job,’ he says.
‘Oh,’ I say. I still don’t get it.
‘Don’t you know what a blow job is?’ he says.
‘Yeah,’ I say, hoping he won’t ask again.
‘What is it then?’ he says.
‘It’s rude,’ I say. I can tell it’s rude and my face is hot and not just because of the sun.
Sean grins. ‘Do you know what a hand job is?’ he says.
‘Stop it!’ I say. ‘I’ll go home.’
‘You’re such a baby sometimes,’ he says, thro
wing his ice-lolly stick into the drain. I don’t want the rest of mine any more so I do the same.
‘Let’s go,’ he says.
‘Where?’
‘Surprise.’
Sean is running before I can even stand up. I follow him through the streets, not sure where we’re going, but that doesn’t matter when I’m with Sean. At the next corner he stops and tries to climb a lamp post but keeps sliding down.
‘Once,’ he says, ‘this boy in year six climbed all the way to the top.’
‘That’s impossible,’ I say.
‘No! He did. And he slid back down like on a fireman’s pole.’
‘You’re not supposed to climb them,’ I say. There was a special assembly and a policeman came. They played a video where a boy climbed up and got electrocuted and died and at the end we all got a sticker. ‘They’re electric,’ I say to Sean. ‘You can die.’
‘That was pylons,’ he says. Then he starts running again.
Next time we stop I’m out of breath and my legs feel funny.
‘Don’t you know where we are?’ he says.
I look around and it feels like being in a dream. Like I’m not really here.
‘Is …’ I start, and then walk, and Sean follows me, climbing up on to the garden wall and walking alongside me.
‘You wanted to see where your old house was,’ he says. He spits into someone’s garden.
My heart is beating faster as I walk and everything I’m seeing seems to get sharper edges and brighter colours. I recognise Mrs Lyon’s house and the one with the green front door and the garden with the wishing well and then …
‘Where is it?’ I ask Sean. ‘Where is my house?’
There’s just a gap where my house should be, and when I look at it, it feels like being ripped in half.
‘It burned down,’ Sean says, jumping down from the garden wall. ‘Duh.’
‘But …’ I look at the space. It looks too small and I think maybe I’m remembering wrong because my house was big, it was enormous. I look up and down the street for where it really is.
‘You know it burned down,’ Sean says. ‘Everyone knows.’
I knew there was a fire. I knew the night I went to stay with Auntie Fay, when the doorbell went in the middle of the night and Uncle Paul turned on all the lights before he went downstairs. I kept hearing them say ‘fire’. I heard them crying. I didn’t want to know but I did. I knew my mum was gone, that she wasn’t coming back to get me. Auntie Fay and Uncle Paul didn’t go back to bed. I thought if I stayed in bed it wouldn’t be real. In the morning, when the sun was really up and I heard Ryan go downstairs, Auntie Fay came into my room and shook my shoulder. I pretended to sleep. Auntie Fay shook me harder and I started crying before she could even start talking because it wasn’t going away, the bad dream wouldn’t stop.
But I thought there would be something left, something to show that Mum and I were here once, and that we were happy.
Now it seems impossible that I am looking at nothing because once it was everything. I step into the space and it’s cooler because of the two houses on either side stopping the sun from getting in. Other than that it feels the same as anywhere else. I close my eyes and try to feel something but nothing comes. A tear creeps out and I squeeze my eyes tighter, make fists with my hands.
But then Sean pulls my hand open and holds it, his palm sticky from the cider lolly, and I can’t stop the tears any more.
14
Him: Now
Computers have always made sense to me. After Mum left, Dad got me an Atari as a distraction, and together we programmed our own games. He didn’t do anything else for me, but he gave me that and maybe it was enough.
At the unit they liked to encourage us: all that happy-clappy shit to counteract the bars on the fucking windows. So when I told them I liked computers they made sure I got the lessons.
‘Maybe you could get a job in IT,’ they’d say, smiling at me like I was a dog who’d learned to give his paw. As if any company hires an IT guy with a fucking record.
They stayed true to their word and they got me a diploma that’s not worth the paper it’s written on out in the real world.
Still, it wasn’t completely wasted.
Most of this stuff even an idiot like Slimy could manage. He already has the Tor browser, so getting on the dark net is easy. It sounds so fucking mysterious and dangerous; like there should be reams of scrolling green code on a black background, some shadowy hacker in an unlit basement crossing over into some alternate cyberspace full of viruses and child pornography.
The reality is that almost anyone can get this far, can make a few clicks and order some weed and pills like you’re browsing Amazon. Simple. Like I said, it must be, or Slimy wouldn’t be able to do it.
It’s not infallible, untraceable. You get ripped off; you get busted. That’s why it’s best to use someone else’s laptop, someone who isn’t on parole, or who doesn’t have much to lose.
‘Skin up,’ Slimy says, his bloodshot eyes staring lazily at the TV screen.
‘Busy,’ I say.
‘What are you doing?’ he asks.
‘Business,’ I say.
The problem last time I was out was that I used my own laptop, my own Wi-Fi. They weren’t too impressed with what I did with my diploma but my options were limited. I was an entrepreneur, but not the right kind.
Slimy groans and heaves himself up to roll another joint. ‘Can’t you do that somewhere else?’ he asks.
‘Chill,’ I say. ‘It’s totally untraceable.’
‘I know, but …’
‘I’ll throw you a twenty bag,’ I say and he immediately pipes down.
Yesterday I sent an enquiry email to Dr Isherwood’s office saying I was looking for a new psychiatrist for my son and that his records were in the file attached. I didn’t expect it to work. Most people are savvy enough to know not to open attachments from unknown senders but her PA must be the nosy type, hoping to rifle through someone’s personal information. I made it juicy, dropped in a line about sexual misconduct. And now I’m looking through the contact details for most of her patients.
Most, but not all. I can’t see anyone who might be her.
I open Isherwood’s Outlook and poke around but, unsurprisingly, there’s nothing there from my girl either. Maybe Isherwood has finally moved on? That thought hits me in the chest and I feel sure that I’ve finally lost her for good, or that she’s lost me. I’m angry, like she’s planned this, but I know that she hasn’t, and that if she’s lost Isherwood then she’s suffering more than I could ever make her.
I dig through Isherwood’s messy email folders and accidentally stumble upon a new one, a sub folder named Iris. My heart speeds up because I think it’s her, it must be, but the folder is full of adoption shit and emails from her solicitor. Congratulations, one subject reads. Inside, We are pleased to inform you that your application has been approved. Another from her solicitor explains how she goes about obtaining a birth certificate, another about changing the baby’s name. Further back, flights to India and arrangements for visiting the orphanage.
I stare at the screen, unable to move.
‘Tanker,’ Slimy says, leaning over the arm of the sofa, extending his hand, a joint pinched between two fingers. I take it and inhale deeply. The tip is dry and Slimy watches me while I take a drag.
‘What are you staring at me like that for, bruv?’ I snap. ‘Waiting for a fucking review?’
‘Jesus, mate. Calm down. You looked proper pasty, like you were pulling a whitey,’ he says. He sighs and turns back to the TV.
He’s right though, I feel like shit. Heart pounding, dizzy. I can’t figure out what to do with this new information, what it might mean.
I stare at the screen. A new notification pops up on Isherwood’s Outlook, and it feels like one of those magical moments even before I look at it. Do you know what I mean? It feels weighted. I feel pulled towards the moment like it has its own orbit and my h
ands feel heavy on the trackpad as I slide the cursor to the inbox and click. Straight away I know it’s her, even though the name reads Charlotte. She’s saying that she’s thought about it and she’s decided she does want a mobile phone and I know that whatever it is that’s always brought us back together is still there and that it’s still as powerful as it always was.
And now I know something that she doesn’t. I know about Iris and I know that she won’t like that at all.
15
Her: Now
I wait until the next evening and then I take the till receipt with Jack’s number on and hang around outside the telephone room until it’s free. He doesn’t answer so I leave a message but as soon as I put the phone down it’s ringing and when I pick it up I recognise his voice.
‘Who’s this? I missed your call,’ he says.
‘It’s me. Charlotte,’ I say. ‘From work.’
‘What’s up?’ he asks.
‘You asked me to call you,’ I say.
‘You wouldn’t have called if you didn’t want to,’ he says. I can hear him smiling; I can hear his friends in the background: ‘Is she hot, Jacky-boy?’
I feel even more like I don’t want to go out but we both know that I have no choice.
‘I’ll take you out on Saturday,’ he says. He’s laughing and telling his friends to fuck off. ‘Shall I pick you up?’
‘No. I can meet you there.’
‘Where are we going, then?’
It’s been so long since I went out in the evening and had to choose what to do that I can’t think of anything.
‘Bowling?’ he says. ‘Cinema?’
‘Yes. Cinema.’
‘I’ll text you,’ he says. ‘Give me your number.’
‘I lost my phone,’ I say quickly. ‘I need to wait until payday for another one. Shall I just meet you there at six?’
‘Six? You’re keen,’ he says. I don’t know what he means so I just stay quiet. ‘Hello?’ he asks.