Candy

by Kevin Brooks

  “Was she using?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Using…taking drugs.”

  I thought about it, picturing her face, her fresh white skin, her arms, her lips, her eyes…her eyes…

  Like tiny black holes.

  “I don’t know,” I said, wondering if I was lying. “I don’t think so…I mean, she seemed all right.”

  “Any track marks on her arms?”

  “No.”

  “What about Iggy?”

  “I didn’t look that closely.”

  “But he definitely had some kind of hold over her?”

  “She was petrified of him.”

  Gina said, “But she was all right with you?”

  “Yeah, she was fine before he turned up. She was just…I don’t know…” I looked at Gina. “She was really nice.”

  “Pretty?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What kind of pretty?”

  “I don’t know—what kinds of pretty are there?”

  “All kinds.” She smiled. “Beautiful pretty, sexy pretty, sultry pretty, tarty pretty…was she tarty?”

  “A bit, I suppose…but not in a nasty way.”

  “Tarty but cute?”

  “Yeah…maybe.”

  I looked away then, suddenly feeling tired, and also a little bit ashamed of myself. It didn’t feel right, talking about Candy as if she was just something to look at—some shiny little bauble or trinket or something. Whatever she was, and whatever she did, she didn’t deserve that.

  “I’m tired,” I said, stretching my arms and yawning. “I think I’ll be getting off to bed now.”

  “Yeah, well,” said Gina, “you’ve had a long day.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re sure you’re all right now? You’re not worried about anything…?”

  “What’s there to worry about?”

  “Nothing, I suppose.” She shrugged. “I mean, you’re not going to see her again, are you?”

  “Not unless I want my throat cut.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Mike said. “Most of these guys are all mouth. They don’t want any trouble.”

  “They won’t get any from me,” I said, trying to sound casual, trying to ignore the sudden image in my mind—the image of a darkened cave, glinting with gold, a death-mask grin…

  I stood up.

  “Well,” I said, “I’ll leave you to it, then.”

  Gina stifled a yawn. “G’night, Joe.”

  “Yeah,” said Mike. “Take it easy.”

  Upstairs, I went to the bathroom, brushed my teeth, then trudged wearily into my bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed. It was two-thirty in the morning. My body was exhausted and my head felt drained, but my mind was still buzzing with thoughts: What’s Dad going to say about Gina and Mike getting married? What’s it going to be like when Gina moves out? What if Mum and Dad get married again and Mum moves back in?

  I was thinking about these things, but I wasn’t really thinking about them—they were just there, just floating around like dead leaves drifting on the surface of a pond. They didn’t really mean anything to me. Below the surface, though, down in the icy black depths, I could see things that meant something. Moving things, living things, formless shapes, darting and flickering in the darkness, stirring up the silt, whirling in the gloom, forming a narrow black tunnel, with me at one end and a death mask at the other and a pale white ghost floating somewhere in between…

  Shit, I said to myself, shaking my head. I’m too tired for this.

  I got up and started getting undressed.

  Shirt off…

  You probably won’t even remember her in the morning.

  Shoes off…

  She’ll just be another lost dream.

  Socks off…

  You’ll meet some girl at the bus stop and forget that Candy ever existed.

  Trousers off…

  What’s that?

  I was checking my pockets before I took off my trousers, just emptying out the loose change and stuff, when my fingers closed on something unfamiliar. You know how it is with the stuff in your pockets, how you pretty much know what’s in them, and even if you don’t know, your fingers do—that’s a £1 coin, that’s a train ticket, that’s a plectrum—and that odd little feeling you get when you put your hand in your pocket and your fingers close on something out of place, something that shouldn’t be there?

  Well, that’s how I felt at that moment. My fingers had closed on something that shouldn’t have been there. It felt like a little piece of card, rolled into a tube, and at first I thought it was a train ticket. But it was too small to be a train ticket, and I wouldn’t roll a train ticket into a tube, anyway.

  I pulled it out.

  It was a tube of card—white card, rolled tightly into a tube, about two inches long, folded in the middle, smudged with damp fingerprints…

  My heart flipped.

  I knew what it was.

  I could see it in Candy’s hands as she fought back the tears and apologized to Iggy. I could see her rolling it, unrolling it, twisting it, folding it…and then, just a couple of minutes later, I could feel her slipping it into my pocket, her hand brushing my thigh as she leaned across and reached for my chair as Iggy was moving toward me.

  I knew what it was.

  It was in my hands.

  A moist and grubby jewel.

  I sat down on the bed and slowly unfolded it, then carefully unrolled it, revealing the creased remains of a plain white business card. CANDY, it said, in neat black script. No other words, no messages, no details, just CANDY—with a cell phone number printed underneath.

  chapter four

  I almost called her straight away. I can still see myself sitting there—two-thirty in the morning, half-naked, perched on the edge of the bed, holding my cell phone in my hand, my finger poised over the buttons, a voice inside me saying, Go on, ring her, just press the buttons, ring her right now…

  But then I started thinking about it—What are you going to say? What if she’s asleep? What if Iggy answers?—and that was that. The moment had gone. I tried getting it back, but it was one of those things that need to be done without hesitation and without any thought, because once you start thinking about it, it’s already too late. There’s no going back.

  I sat there for a little while longer, staring at the phone in my hand, but I knew that I’d missed my chance.

  It’s all right, I told myself. You can ring her tomorrow. You’ll feel better about everything then, anyway. You’ll have had time to think. Or if not tomorrow, there’s always the next day, or the next day, or the day after that…

  There’s no hurry, is there?

  You’ve got to get yourself in the right frame of mind…

  It took me just over a week to realize that there wasn’t a right frame of mind, that even looking for a frame of mind was a complete waste of time, and that the only thing to do was what I should have done in the first place—just ring the damn number.

  The week went by with a weird sense of timelessness. Days seemed to last forever, with long stretched-out mornings, interminable afternoons, and never-ending nights. Yet at the same time, when a new day dawned and I looked back at yesterday, it seemed to have passed so rapidly that it was hard to believe it had happened at all. Tomorrows, on the other hand, were centuries away.

  I didn’t understand it, and I’m not sure I wanted to. I had enough on my mind without trying to work out the vagaries of time. All I really wanted to do was get on with my life without getting too mixed up about Candy.

  Not that there was much to get on with.

  School…

  The Katies…

  School…

  Dad.

  We didn’t see a lot of each other. He left for work quite early each morning, and when I got back from school he was usually in his study, writing reports or answering letters, clicking away on his keyboard, frowning at the walls. Sometimes we’d have dinner together
and sometimes Gina was there, but a lot of the time Dad went out in the evenings and Gina was either working late or out somewhere with Mike, and I had rehearsals with The Katies. So, all in all, there wasn’t much family stuff going on.

  I saw Gina on Sunday and we had a quick chat about things. She asked me how I was doing, and I told her I was fine.

  “School OK?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Met any more hookers lately?”

  “No.”

  “How’s the group going?”

  “All right. We’ve got a gig in London in a couple of weeks.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Opening for Bluntslide.”

  “Who?”

  “Bluntslide. They’re from Manchester. They’ve just signed a big deal with Polydor. There’ll probably be all sorts of people there—music press, agents, record company people…”

  Gina nodded, impressed. “Maybe I’ll come along.”

  “Yeah, that’d be good. You could bring Mike.”

  “OK, it’s a date.”

  I looked at her. “Have you told Dad yet?”

  “About me and Mike getting married?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I was going to tell him today. I thought he was staying at home.”

  “He’s gone to London with Mum. They’re going to see a show or something.”

  “I know.”

  Neither of us said anything for a while. I didn’t know if Gina wanted to talk about it, and I didn’t know if I did, either. It was a hard thing to talk about—uncomfortable, messy, complicated.

  “Do you think they’re serious?” I said eventually.

  Gina didn’t say anything, just shook her head.

  I looked at her. “Dad seems to be enjoying himself—”

  “Do you know what she said once?” Gina said suddenly.

  “Who—Mum?”

  “Yeah, when they were getting divorced. I heard them talking one night in Dad’s study. She said, ‘It’s not us, Charles; it’s never been that. It’s just the whole marriage thing. Living together, bringing up children, building a home…it’s not for me. It never was. I’m too selfish for that. I just want you, that’s all. I don’t want to share you with anyone.’”

  I stared at Gina, seeing bitterness in her eyes. “She said that?”

  “Yeah, like she wanted a divorce from us. Not from Dad, from us.”

  I didn’t know what to say. It seemed an odd thing for Mum to want, especially after all this time, but it kind of made sense, in a way. It would explain why she never visited us and why she was seeing Dad again and why she’d left in the first place…

  But explanations don’t change anything, do they? They don’t make you feel any better. You either like something or you don’t, and if you don’t like it, then knowing why it happens doesn’t make any difference—it’s still going to happen and you’re still not going to like it, so what’s the point?

  Wednesday night was The Katies night. We practiced every week in a drafty old warehouse that was owned by the local arts group. They used it mostly for theater rehearsals and exhibitions and stuff, but to make ends meet they hired it out when it wasn’t being used, and it wasn’t used all that much, especially in winter. So every Wednesday night—and occasionally on weekends—we’d book ourselves in for three or four hours, set up our gear, and make lots of noise.

  That’s how I approached it, anyway—a bit of fun, a bit of a bash, and lots of high-speed noise.

  The others were a bit more serious. They’d been together for quite a while before I joined the group, and they were all at least a year older than me, and much more ambitious. Before I joined they used to play some really heavy stuff, all gothy and dark and gruesome, but then they started hanging around the skateboard park where I used to hang out with my friends and they started hearing the stuff that we were listening to—which was still pretty heavy, but not heavy heavy, and not so pretentious, either. And then…I can’t really remember exactly what happened. I think I just got to talking to them one day. I didn’t really know them, but I knew who they were from school and I knew they played in a group, so when I heard them raving about the bass line on a New Found Glory track that someone was playing, saying that that was the sound they were looking for, I just happened to mention that I had a bass and I could probably play like that…and things just progressed from there.

  We practiced a lot, wrote some decent songs, started getting a few gigs, made a couple of demo tapes, and now things were really starting to move—better gigs, more money, a bit of record company interest here and there. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it, but the others were really keen.

  When I turned up for the practice that night, everyone was going on about this gig we’d got lined up, the one in London I’d told Gina about. They were discussing what to wear, what to play, what to do if we got offered a deal. Very serious. I listened for a while, not really joining in, then I just kind of drifted away and started messing about on the guitar.

  It gets a bit boring playing bass all the time, and it’s nice to strap on a guitar now and then, especially when you can play it really loud—the crackle of the pickups when you plug it in, the expectant hum of the amp when you crank up the volume, the incredible buzz of power when you slam out the chords…

  “Hey!” yelled Jason, the singer. “Hey! HEY!”

  I stopped playing and looked at him. “What?”

  “We’re trying to talk here.”

  “Sorry…I’ll turn it down.”

  Chris—whose guitar I was playing—gave me a dirty look, then he turned back to Jason and Ronny, the drummer, and they all got back to their big-time yapping. The whole thing struck me as a bit ridiculous—telling me to turn it down, like they were my bloody parents or something. I mean, if all they wanted to do was talk, why bother hiring the warehouse at all? Why not book a table in a nice quiet restaurant somewhere?

  I turned the volume down, then went over and sat cross-legged in front of the amp and kept playing. I’d been working at home on the song I’d started the night I met Candy, and I began playing it now. It sounded a lot better on an electric guitar than it did on my old acoustic, and when I put some echo and fuzz on it and got a bit of feedback going, it sounded really good. It was a bit slower than the kind of stuff we usually played, slower and more melodic, but it still had a nice spiky edge to it. As I played, I could hear the vocal line in my head, giving it another dimension, and an off-beat guitar line wailing away in the background, and the rock-steady thump of drums and bass…

  “What’s that?” someone said.

  I stopped playing again and looked up to see Jason standing in front of me. He looked the perfect loser—baggy jeans, baggy jacket, baggy hair—but I knew for a fact that the jacket alone had set him back £300. That’s how it was with us, though—we were the kind of skateboard rebels who had enough money to really look like shit.

  “Is that one of yours?” Jason said.

  “What—the song?”

  “Yeah—the song. What’s it called?”

  “I don’t know…nothing really…‘Candy,’ maybe…”

  “Play it again,” he said, nodding at the guitar in my hands. “Turn it up a bit. It sounded pretty good. Maybe we could do something with it.”

  After that, we spent the rest of the night working on my song. It was really strange, hearing it become something. I’d written plenty of songs before, but Jason and Chris wrote all the stuff for The Katies and they’d always been a bit funny about listening to anyone else’s songs, so I tended to keep mine to myself. I’d suggested ideas for songs now and then, and I usually wrote my own bass lines, but I’d never worked with the group on a song that was mine before, so it was a whole new experience for me. At first, it felt immensely satisfying—it was my song, I’d written it, and now it was turning into something real. It was growing, evolving, and—best of all—it was starting to sound fantastic. But as we kept working on it—adding bits here, changing bits there—the satis
faction began to fade and another feeling took over. I couldn’t work it out at first. It was an empty kind of feeling…the sort of feeling you get when you’ve lost something or something’s been stolen from you…that nagging sense of loss.

  Yeah, that’s what it was.

  I felt as if I’d lost something.

  I’d lost my song.

  It wasn’t mine anymore.

  Its feelings weren’t mine.

  It was still a pretty good song, though. It was the kind of song that sticks in your head for days on end, with a chorus you can’t stop humming, and I suppose that was some kind of compensation. On the other hand, because it was a good song and because I couldn’t stop humming it all the time and because I hadn’t been smart enough to change the title, so it was still called “Candy”…because of all that, I found myself walking around for the next couple of days with a chorus of Candys echoing around in my head.

  Which wasn’t the best way to get on with my life without getting too mixed up about her. Not that I ever really thought I could. But it was worth a try.

  I finally called her on Friday. I’d been thinking about it all week—trying to decide when to do it, where to do it, what to say, how to sound—but the more I thought about it, the more daunting it became. What if I say something stupid? What if she doesn’t remember me? What if she doesn’t want to talk to me? What if…what if…what if…? In the end, I realized that if I didn’t just do it, I’d never do it at all.

  So what I did was, on Friday morning, I set a trap to catch myself unawares. It wasn’t much of a trap, and I didn’t really think it’d work, but I couldn’t see how I’d be any worse off if it didn’t—so what did I have to lose?

  The plan was to leave my cell phone behind when I went to school in the morning, just leave it lying around in my bedroom somewhere and forget all about it. Forget about phones, forget about Candy, forget about ringing her. Forget about everything. Then later on, after school, sometime in the evening, when I wasn’t thinking about anything, when I was just hanging around with nothing to do, I’d suddenly come across the phone and ring the number before my brain had a chance to stop me.