by Kevin Brooks
Syringes in the gutter.
Stone-faced bruisers in dirty little doorways, checking me out as I passed them by.
I didn’t feel threatened, exactly…but I didn’t feel too comfortable, either. I felt small and stupid and out of place. I knew I didn’t belong here, and I knew that everyone else knew it, too. It made me feel that I mustn’t stop walking, that if I stopped walking, something bad would happen.
So I kept walking.
It was tempting to keep my head down, my eyes fixed hard to the ground, but I knew I had to keep looking, no matter what. I had to keep looking for Candy…or Iggy…or a nice little third-floor flat in a refurbished Victorian house. The trouble was, I’d know Candy or Iggy if I saw them…but a refurbished Victorian house?
What the hell did that look like?
I had no idea.
So I just kept walking, kept looking, kept on going in the hope that something would happen. Otherwise…what? Start all over again? Keep walking in circles forever? Stop and ask someone?
Yeah, right…stop and ask someone. “Excuse me, I’m looking for a prostitute and her pimp…she’s young and pretty and addicted to heroin, and he’s big and black and really scary, and I think they live in a refurbished Victorian house…”
Yeah, good idea, Joe.
Good thinking.
Why not ask those policemen over there…?
Policemen?
There were two of them, just up ahead, in a patrol car parked at the side of the road. They didn’t seem to be doing anything—they were just sitting in their car, looking bored and mean—but the sight of them gave me a shock. What if they stopped me and started asking me questions? What are you doing around here? Where are you going? Why aren’t you at school? I couldn’t tell them the truth, could I? And, just at that moment, I couldn’t think of any suitable lies…
So—as casually as possible—I turned around and started walking back the way I’d come.
I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t seen the patrol car. Maybe everything would have turned out OK. Maybe I would have walked around King’s Cross for another couple of hours without finding anything, and then maybe I would have gone back home, and then maybe…
I don’t know.
Maybe something else would have happened.
But it didn’t…because I didn’t walk around King’s Cross for another couple of hours without finding anything. Instead, in my eagerness to get away from the patrol car, I found myself hurrying along the backstreets without really thinking where I was going, and it wasn’t until I was halfway across a busy main road, waiting for the lights to change, that I came to my senses and realized where I was—I was standing on a traffic island in the middle of Euston Road, directly opposite the main entrance to the station. I was right back where I’d started from.
And that’s when I saw Iggy.
He was coming out of the station. Walking tall, in a long black leather coat, with his head held high and his arms swinging confidently and his loaded eyes full of nothing. I could see people avoiding his gaze, getting out of his way, instinctively afraid of his size and his strength and his total lack of feeling. And, although his face was blank, I could see that he loved it.
Without thinking, I shuffled back a few steps and got myself into a position behind some other pedestrians from where I could still see Iggy, but hopefully he couldn’t see me. With my heart pumping hard, I watched him—striding across the front of the station, passing the newspaper kiosks, passing Boots, moving with the effortless ease of a man who knows exactly where he’s going. And he was going. Veering off to the left, heading down behind the station…heading out of sight…
I pushed my way to the front of the traffic island, jostling through the bodies and praying for the lights to change. It was the rush hour now, there was too much traffic…I couldn’t cross the road. I looked up in panic. Iggy was disappearing around the corner…I was losing him…
Then the beeps sounded and the lights changed and the traffic stopped and I was off, running diagonally across the road, onto the pavement, dodging through the crowds, sprinting to the corner, skidding breathlessly to a halt…and then, vaguely aware of how stupid I probably looked, I poked my head around the corner and peered down the street. It wasn’t too busy—traffic was heavy, but the pavements weren’t overcrowded—and I spotted Iggy almost immediately. With his size and his height and his long black coat, he wasn’t hard to spot. He was about fifty meters away, walking along the pavement on the right-hand side of the road, swinging his arm, gesturing with his hand, as if he was talking to himself.
My head raced.
I wasn’t thinking.
I was set on automatic: follow him, don’t let him see you, follow him, don’t let him see you, follow him… I followed him.
I’m not sure how I did it. I’d never followed anyone before. I didn’t know anything about following people—How close do you get? What if they turn around? What do you do when they go around a corner?—but somehow I managed to keep on his trail without being seen. It probably helped that he didn’t know he was being followed. I mean, I didn’t have to do anything sneaky. I didn’t have to cover my face with a newspaper or pretend to be tying my shoelaces or anything. I just had to follow him: down the back of the station for a few hundred meters, then right into a narrow street lined with warehouses and office blocks, then left, then right again, over a waterway, into a maze of hidden backstreets…
Things got a little trickier then. I had to stay close enough to avoid losing sight of him, but I couldn’t get too close because the streets around here were fairly empty. If he happened to stop and turn around, he was bound to see me. Whether he’d recognize me or not was another matter. Probably not, I thought. But with a man like Iggy, probably not wasn’t much comfort. So I hung back a bit, watching from the cover of roadside trees, parked cars, pillar-boxes, whatever I could find.
Most of the houses around here were three—or four-story terraced buildings with curtained bay windows and peeling paintwork and rows of handwritten nameplates next to a communal doorbell on the porch wall. Flats and studios, I guessed.
Victorian houses?
Maybe…
They looked vaguely familiar, and I wondered if I’d already been this way when I was trailing around in circles earlier on. Possibly…probably…it was hard to tell. The streetlights were on now. Darkness was coming down fast. Things look different in the dark: flatter, colder, more sinister.
Iggy had stopped.
Halfway along a cramped little terrace, shadowed in the sodium glow of a street lamp, his long black coat reflecting the stark orange light. He wasn’t doing anything. Just standing there, outside a tall white house, gazing up at the softly lit windows.
I was about thirty meters away, on a tree-lined street that branched off the terrace at a right angle. There was a small stretch of park to my left, which gave me a perfect view of Iggy and the tall white house. I studied the house. It was the same as all the other houses in the street: terraced, three stories high, flat-fronted, with stone steps leading up to an unlit porchway. Iggy was climbing the steps now…pulling out a key…unlocking the door…glancing over his shoulder…
He entered the house.
Now what? I asked myself. What do you do now? Stay here? Move? Get closer? How was I supposed to know? I’d never done anything like this before. It was dark. I was cold…shivering…sweating…hungry…empty…
Thoughtless.
Just then, a car rolled down the street. Its headlights swept the plane trees, lighting up their paled trunks, the park railings, me. I froze. I saw my shadow looming across the pavement—a hunched black figure with a lengthened head, creeping out from behind the trees…
Not good, I thought.
The car slowed for a moment…the engine idling…and then it moved off again, taking my shadow with it. You can’t stay here, I told myself, breathing a sigh of relief. Lurking around in the trees…you’ll get arrested. I waited u
ntil the car had turned the corner at the end of the road, then I moved out from behind the tree and started walking. Down the street, left into the terrace, along the pavement on the park side of the road, keeping in close to the railings. The white house was on the opposite side of the street. As I approached it, I kept my eyes to the ground, not daring to look. I wanted to look…God, I wanted to look. But if Iggy were to come out now…
I forced myself not to imagine it.
A few seconds later I came to a wrought-iron gate in the railings. The gate was open, leading into the little park. Before I knew what I was doing, I’d stepped through the gate and was following a little pathway around to the right, pausing at a wooden bench, taking a quick look around, then moving off the pathway and edging my way into a shoulder-high thicket of bushes and shrubs that bordered the park.
I could smell the earth—damp and dark.
Litter.
Leaves.
Sap.
Thorns.
Then I was facing the railings again. Looking through the iron bars at the terrace, the white house…the windows, the steps, the front door. There was no sign of any movement. I stepped back into the shadows and positioned myself behind a bush, then settled down to wait.
Nothing much happened for a while. The street moved quietly to the early-evening sounds of cars and people passing by, but none of them stopped. They were all going somewhere else. Home, probably…or out for the night…just cruising around…looking for fun. No one went into the white house, and no one came out. The curtains stayed shut.
The windows, I noticed, had metal bars on the front. This bothered me for a while—why does a house need bars on the windows?—but then I realized that all the other houses had barred windows, too, so I guessed it didn’t mean anything. The houses around here had barred windows, that was all. It didn’t mean anything. But as I crouched there, hiding in the bushes, watching the house, I found myself curiously drawn to these black barred windows. I couldn’t stop staring at them. Studying them, concentrating on the regularity of the bars, the black lines, the width of the gaps, the background whiteness of the curtains…and after a while the lines began forming themselves into a perfectly focused grid, black on white, black on white, black on white…and I started having really weird thoughts. I imagined the chaos of the last few days distilling itself into clearly defined elements, each embedded in its own neatly outlined rectangle. One, two, three, four, five, six…six perfect rectangles. And inside the rectangles were symbols…elements…nameless shapes of things I didn’t understand—shadows, shades, abstractions, forms—flickering colors on a pure white background.
None of it meant anything to me.
It was just there.
And then the front door opened and Iggy came out, and suddenly the bars were just bars again. The curtains were just curtains. And Iggy was leaving the house and walking away up the street.
I gave it a good five minutes before I made a move. I wanted to make sure that Iggy wasn’t coming back. I also wanted to give myself time to clear all the crap out of my head. The weird stuff—the bars, the symbols, the elements…whatever it was. I didn’t need it. And, to tell you the truth, it scared me a bit. So I just stayed where I was, breathing in the cold night air, soaking up the woody scent of the bushes, emptying my mind…until I was fairly sure I was back on planet Earth again.
Then I stood up…
And squatted back down again.
How was I going to get in the house?
I couldn’t just ring the bell, could I? I didn’t know who was in there. I was hoping that Candy was in there, but I couldn’t be sure. Some of Iggy’s crew could be in there. It could be his house. It could be empty…
God.
I wished I knew what I was doing.
But I didn’t.
And what’s the best thing to do when you don’t know what to do? Nothing. Just wait. Give it time. See what happens.
So that’s what I did.
I waited.
I gave it time.
And, after a while, I saw what happened.
A black woman approached the house. She was big and bulky, dressed in a lumpy beige coat, and she was carrying a full bag in each hand. The bags looked heavy. Sainsbury’s bags, full of shopping. She stopped outside the house for a moment and rested the bags on the pavement, then she picked them up again and started struggling up the steps, taking them one at a time.
I moved out of the bushes, ran along the pathway, then slowed to a walk as I passed through the gate and started across the road. The woman was at the top of the steps now. She’d put down the shopping bags and was ringing the bell and leaning toward the intercom. My heart was racing as I approached the house, but I forced myself to smile…skipping up the steps as the front door swung open and the woman bent down to pick up the bags…
I stepped up, still smiling, and said, “Here, let me get those for you.” Before she could say anything, I’d picked up the bags and was holding the door open for her. “After you,” I said, all bright and breezy. She gave me a funny little look, then shrugged and went inside. I stepped in after her, looking around, taking it all in: the murky corridor, the hall table piled with junk mail, the stained linoleum floor, the steep flight of stairs on my right, the smell of stale air…
“Where do you want them?” I asked the woman, indicating the bags.
“Just here,” she said.
I put the bags on the floor. She looked at me again, then picked them up and headed off down the corridor, leaving me standing at the foot of the stairs, looking up into the unknown, my insides pounding like a thousand drums.
chapter twelve
The house felt empty as I climbed the stairs. I knew it wasn’t—I could hear the woman who’d let me in rattling drawers somewhere below, and from somewhere above I could hear the faint sound of a radio playing behind closed doors—but everything still felt empty. The dark stairs, the colorless walls, the threadbare carpet beneath my feet…there was nothing to it. No life, no soul. No comfort. This wasn’t a home, it was just a place.
I moved cautiously, pausing after every step, keeping still, looking up, listening hard…then another step…another pause…another step…another pause. It was slow going, but I didn’t want to take any chances. A dim light was shining from the second or third floor, and I could still hear the sound of the radio…
There were people here.
Somewhere.
I went on up to the first floor and paused on the landing. A long corridor stretched out to my right. It was similar to the hallway downstairs, only this one had doors—six doors, three on each side. They were all closed. In the airless silence I could hear cars passing on the street outside. Headlights swept across a curtained window at the end of the corridor, briefly illuminating the scuffed old walls, then the lights passed by and the corridor sank back into its semidarkness. I breathed in, trying to calm myself. The air up here smelled different from the air downstairs. It smelled almost clean, but not quite—a sort of air-freshenery cleanness. The kind of smell that’s supposed to remove the bad smells but doesn’t—it just hides them.
Pots rattled downstairs—the black woman…
I moved on.
Up the stairs to the second floor…or was it the first floor? I wasn’t sure. Does the ground floor count as the first floor? Do houses have ground floors?
Does it matter?
No, it didn’t. It was just something to think about as I climbed the stairs, something to keep my mind off the grubbiness and the emptiness and the overwhelming stink of fear that pervaded the house and everything in it, including me…
There was bad stuff going on in here.
Bad stuff, bad people…
I reached the second-floor landing—another long corridor, another curtained window, another six doors. Same as before. Nothing happening. No life, no joy. I turned away…and was just about to move on again, when I heard the sound of a door opening. I turned back. Halfway along the hallway, a gi
rl in a white bathrobe was coming out of a room. Olive-skinned, barefoot, dark-haired, pretty. She stopped at the sight of me.
I smiled at her.
She didn’t smile back. She didn’t do anything. Her eyes were vacant. Her mouth was closed, without expression…as if it had been closed forever.
“Excuse me…” I said.
She just stared at me.
I cleared my throat. “I was looking for someone…”
She blinked once, shook her head, then closed the door and walked off down the hallway. I watched her as she opened a door and went into what I guessed was a bathroom. The door closed. Taps started running.
I stood there for a moment, feeling strangely unmoved, then kept on up the stairs.
The third floor was just as dull as the others—dull hallway, dull doors, dull walls, dull window—but it wasn’t quite so lifeless. There was a light, for one thing—a pale white light in a cobwebbed paper shade, hanging from the ceiling. And the music was louder, too. The radio music…it seemed to be coming from the first room on the right.
Music, lights…it wasn’t much, but at least it gave the impression of some kind of life.
There were no more stairs now. Nowhere else to go. This was the third floor…These were third-floor flats. I didn’t know if the house was Victorian. It certainly wasn’t refurbished, but there wasn’t much I could do about that.
I was here now…
I was here.
I might as well keep going.
I walked down the hallway and stopped outside the room where the music was coming from. It was still muffled, but it sounded pretty good—some kind of Asian hip-hop stuff…twangy guitars, off-beat drums, nice singing. I listened to it for a while, then took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and knocked on the door.
The girl who answered didn’t look well. She had a thin angular face, pale puffy skin, and yellowed eyes. Her hair was shapeless—short, black, harsh—and her clothes were cheap.
She said nothing, just looked at me through a two-inch gap in the doorway.
“I’m looking for Candy,” I told her.