Candy

by Kevin Brooks

  “Yeah,” I said, “thanks.”

  She touched Candy’s shoulder, then walked off briskly across the garden. I watched her sit down at the table. I watched as she opened her briefcase, took out some papers, crossed her legs, and started to read. I kept watching…not knowing why…

  I didn’t want to look at her.

  I wanted to look at Candy…

  But I couldn’t seem to do it. I couldn’t move my head. I wanted to look, but I was too scared of what I might see.

  “Kevin Williams?” I heard her say.

  When I turned to her, she’d raised her eyes from the ground and was gazing steadily into my eyes.

  “It was Mike’s idea,” I said. “They wouldn’t let me see you…”

  “I know.”

  “I didn’t know where you were.”

  “I know.”

  We looked at each other. I was lost for words.

  “Do you want to sit down?” Candy asked.

  “Yeah…OK.”

  We sat down opposite each other. Candy had a pack of cigarettes in her hand. She took one out, put it in her mouth, put the pack on the table, and clicked her lighter. I watched the cigarette smoke curl from her mouth and drift away over the garden.

  “So,” she said, “how are you?”

  “Not too bad, I suppose…how about you?”

  “I’ve been worse.” She looked down at the tip of her cigarette for a moment, then her eyes came back to me. “It’s been a long time…”

  “Yeah…”

  “Four months.”

  “I know.”

  She lowered her eyes again. I watched her fiddling nervously with her cigarette—rolling it, tapping it, flicking ash to the ground—and I didn’t know what to do. It was really strange. I’d spent so long thinking about this moment, thinking of all the things I wanted to say, but now that I was here…none of it seemed to matter. It was all just words. Noise. Nothing. I wished I could be inside Candy’s head—just be there…feeling what she felt…knowing what she thought…being together without any words…

  “How’s Gina?” she asked quietly.

  “She’s OK…she still gets a bit shaky sometimes, but I think she’s going to be all right. She’s getting married to Mike next year.”

  “Really? That’s great.”

  “My dad doesn’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know…he’s just a bit…I don’t know. He gets a bit funny about things sometimes—”

  “Is he here? Did he come with you?”

  “No, he was busy…I came on the train. How about your parents? Have you seen them?”

  “Yeah, they visit me every other week.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “I don’t know…” She put out her cigarette and immediately lit another one. “They want me to go back and live with them…maybe go to college or something…”

  “Can you do that?”

  “What—go to college?”

  “No…I mean, can you leave here?”

  “Not at the moment. I’m still being assessed. It’s part of the bail conditions.”

  “Assessed?”

  “Yeah…” She looked at me. “Psychiatric assessment…it doesn’t really mean anything. It’s just stuff I have to do, you know…it’ll probably help at the trial…counseling, rehab—that kind of thing.” She paused for a moment, staring blankly at the table, and that’s when I noticed her fingernails. They were all chewed up, bitten down to the quick, red and ugly and raw. They never used to be like that. “It’s supposed to help, anyway,” she said suddenly.

  “What is?”

  “What?”

  “What’s supposed to help?”

  “I just told you,” she said impatiently, “the assessment, the counseling…all the shit I have to go through every day.” She darted a glance across the garden, then leaned across the table and lowered her voice. “They’ll acquit me, anyway—self-defense…and even if they don’t, the most I’ll get done for is manslaughter. I’ll probably be out in a couple of months.” She stared at me. “Did you tell the cops about Mason?”

  “Who?”

  “Mason—the driver…the guy I shot…”

  “I said I didn’t see anything.”

  “Good…” She frowned. “What was I saying?”

  “Uh…?”

  “Yeah, I don’t need to be here…It’s no good for me. Did they tell you what happened?”

  “Uh…no,” I said.

  “It wasn’t my fault. I wasn’t feeling right…I got some stuff…I couldn’t help it…The guy down the corridor brought some back at the weekend…”

  I really didn’t understand what was happening now. Her eyes were darting all over the place and she was giving me really weird looks. She seemed angry. Disturbed. Upset about something. And I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about—What stuff? What guy? What corridor?

  “It was the song,” she said. “They played it on the radio.”

  “What song?”

  “My song…your song…” Her face had stilled. “You should have told me.”

  Now I knew what she was talking about—my song, her song…“Candy”—The Katies’ first single. Jason had told me about it a couple of months ago. They’d recorded the demo without me, and the record company had liked it so much they’d signed the band—new bass player and all—and rushed out the song as a single. It wasn’t a stunning success or anything, but it had been dribbling around the bottom of the charts for a while, and a couple of local radio stations had picked up on it, and The Katies had been featured in the national music press…

  I ought to have been really pissed off, I suppose—they’d stolen my song, my words, my music…how dare they?—but I just couldn’t be bothered. I’d tried to get angry when Jason first told me, but my heart wasn’t in it. I couldn’t see the point, anyway. I couldn’t prove it was my song, could I? And even if I could…well, so what? It was only a song…

  “I’m sorry,” I told Candy, “I didn’t know anything about it…I would have told you if I could—”

  “It’s not fair,” she said.

  “I know—”

  “It’s about me.”

  “Well, I know, but—”

  “You said it was about me…That’s what you said. It’s my song…It’s only for me…You can’t sing it to anyone else…”

  “I’m not…It’s nothing to do with me. I’m not singing anything—”

  “I heard it on the radio…”

  She was starting to cry.

  “I heard it…”

  I reached across the table and held her hand. It felt cold and stiff and unfamiliar. “It’s all right,” I said. “You don’t have to cry—”

  “No,” she sobbed, “it’s not all right. It’s not…I’m not…I can’t do it…”

  “You can’t do what?” I asked quietly.

  “Anything…anything…I can’t do anything…”

  Her tears were falling on the back of my hand, as cold as a winter rain…and I was there. I was there. Where I’d always wanted to be. But now it was somewhere else. It wasn’t the same.

  Nothing can be the same.

  Nothing is.

  The woman had rushed over from the other side of the garden, and now she was crouching down beside Candy, comforting her, muttering all the right words.

  “It’s all right…Come on, now…It’s all right…” She turned to me, not unkindly, and said, “I think you’d better go now. She needs some rest.”

  I nodded and stood up, steadying myself against the back of the chair. My legs were shaking. My throat was tight.

  The sun was still blazing down.

  I looked at Candy. She was trembling and pale, her eyes swollen with tears.

  “I’m sorry, Joe,” she whispered. “I’m really sorry…”

  “It’s OK,” I told her. “It’s all right.”

  We looked at each other for a moment longer, then she lowered her eyes, and I wal
ked away.

  It’s been almost six months now since that dull February day when I first met Candy, and I still find it hard to believe. When I’m sitting here at my window, just staring into the past, or when I’m lying on the floor, imagining all my skies, I often find myself drifting back to the beginning again, to those last few moments of my pre-Candy existence, when I was still just a boy…just a boy on a train, a boy with a lump, a boy in a starry black hat.

  I was innocent then.

  I didn’t know anything.

  And, in a way, nothing much has changed—I still don’t know anything now.

  I don’t know what’s happened with Candy.

  I don’t know if she’s lost her mind.

  I don’t know when I’ll be seeing her again.

  The only difference now, for what it’s worth, is that I know that these things don’t matter. I know that I don’t have to know anything, and I know that I don’t have to feel frightened of not knowing—I just have to be here.

  In love and faith.

  I just have to believe.

  It’s not easy—living in a void, living and dying inside your head…wanting what you want so much that you’d give up everything else to get it—but the time still passes, the days go on…and as long as there’s still a tomorrow, there’s always a chance.

  I found out recently that Candy’s been moved from the Resident Adolescent Unit, but no one will tell me where she’s gone. I managed to track down her parents and I’ve been watching their house for a while, but she doesn’t seem to be there. Her mum and dad probably know where she is, but I’m not sure about asking them, and Mike seems fairly reluctant to help me anymore…which is fair enough, I suppose. So it looks like I’ll have to wait for the trial before I see her again. I don’t know when that’s going to be, and I don’t know if we’ll be allowed to talk to each other, anyway, but at least I’ll get to see her.

  And then, afterward, when it’s all over…and if everything turns out OK…or even if it doesn’t turn out OK…

  Well—who knows?

  I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

  GO THERE.

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  Kevin Brooks Talks About…Candy

  Q: Where did the idea for Candy come from?

  A: A long story. The short version is: I was writing another book which included elements of the underwodd—gangsters, vice, drugs, etc.—but for some reason the book wasn’t quite working. So after struggling with it for months and months, I decided to leave it for a while and try something else. Someone suggested I should write a love story. At first I thought, Love story? Hugs and kisses? No, I don’t think so. But then I started thinking about it, and it struck me that there aren’t many love stories told from the boy’s point of view, as if boys don’t fall in love…which they do, of course. They fall in love, and then they go mad—because boys can’t talk about falling in love, so it all gets bottled up inside…the weirdness, the fear, the thrill, the confusion. So I just took that idea, and started mixing it up with some of the stuff and some of the characters I’d been thinking about for the book that didn’t work, and gradually the story of Candy came together.

  Q: Music plays a large part in this book, and you write with great authority about playing bass and composing songs. Do you share Joe’s passion for guitar?

  A: Yes, definitely. For about ten or twelve years my life was all about music—playing in bands, writing songs, recording, trying to make it in the music business. I loved the process of writing songs, and I still do, and I really enjoyed writing about it. Although writing songs is in some ways very different to writing books, the two processes actually share a lot of underlying features—the use of rhythm and tone, the expression and creation of feeling, recurring themes, wariations on themes, and so on.

  I still love playing the guitar, making up songs, and although I really love everything about writing books, I occasionally miss the incredible thrill of being on stage and playing guitar extremely loudly.

  Q: One of the things that makes this novel so compelling is that Candy’s story is not told from her point of view—rather, we see her from the perspective of Joe, the comparatively ordinary boy who is in love with her and believes he can save her. Why did you choose to tell the story this way?

  A: Firstly, because I wanted to look at the whole “falling in love” thing from a boy’s point of view, and to do that I needed to get into Joe’s head (and his heart). But I also wanted to tell Candy’s story from an ordinary, outsider’s perspective, as this allowed me to develop her as a person—i.e., we start off seeing her as Joe sees her, as just a nice attractive girl, but as the story goes on and Joe gets to know her and her world, we begin to see Candy as what she is, what she does, where she came from, what she really is…so her character and her story develop through Joe, and because we’re with him, we get to know the real Candy in the same progressive way that he does.

  Q: You focus on the theme of addiction in Candy: addiction to drugs, addiction to music, addiction to a person. Do you think that love can be a kind of drug? And why did you choose to explore this theme?

  A: Yes, I wanted to look at the idea that we can become addicted to anything—physically, mentally, emotionally—and how immensely strong addiction can be. How it can make us do things that we know are wrong, but we just can’t help it. Like falling in love with someone you shouldn’t be falling in love with…there’s nothing you can do about it. We all like to think we have control over the things we feel and do, but sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we have no control over the things that make us feel things…which is a pretty weird idea when you think about it.

  Q: You draw an incredibly affecting portrait of Candy, a girl from a good family and neighborhood who has been pulled into the underworld. Why did you choose to give her a background that would seem to upend the conventional wisdom about teenage prostitutes? And did you do any research to create this character?

  A: Continuing the addiction/lack of control theme, I wanted to show that it’s not just a certain kind of person who is prone to addiction of any kind, and it’s not just those who suffer major domestic/personal/emotional problems who end up being “pulled into the underworld”—we’re all vulnerable. We all face problems, and obviously some problems are bigger and more catastrophic than others—but it doesn’t take much for a small problem to get out of control, and o
nce something gets out of control, anything can happen.

  I read quite a lot about the vice trade before writing Candy, particularly on the theme of teenage prostitution, and many of the real-life stories I came across were about young girls from safe, comfortable, middle-class homes (just like Candy), who—for various reasons—gradually descended into the world of drugs, pimps, prostitution. It happens all the time, all over the world.

  For more conversation with Kevin Brooks, check out www.thisispush.com

  Check out

  BEING

  by Kevin Brooks

  The Paradise Hotel was seven floors of dull gray concrete on the outskirts of a dull gray town. I didn’t know how I’d got there, and I didn’t know if it was a good idea to stay there or not, but I was bone-tired and wet, and my stomach was hurting, and I just couldn’t walk any farther. But, most of all, I needed to be on my own. I needed to start thinking about things. I needed to do something. Without giving it too much thought, I opened the hotel doors and went inside.

  It was a fairly big place, and fairly posh. Srnoked-glass doors, a dark-carpeted lobby, pillars and panels, plants in brass pots. There was a bar at the far end of the lobby, and a restaurant off to one side. Both were quite busy. Men in suits, wornen in suits, everyone drinking and having a good time.

  I felt out of place.

  I’d never been in a hotel before. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know the procedure. So, for the next five minutes or so, I just stood in the doorway—glancing at my nonexistent watch now and then, as if I was waiting for someone—and I watched what was happening. How it worked. Where people went. What they said.

  Then, when I’d worked it all out, I smoothed back my hair, straightened myself up, and crossed the lobby toward the reception desk.

  The young woman behind the desk was sleek and well dressed. She had a thin face, a false smile, and slick blonde hair. As she watched me crossing the lobby, I wondered what I looked like to her. You’re just an ordinary young man, I told myself. You’re wearing an ordinary jacket and an ordinary shirt, and you’re carrying an ordinary briefcase and an ordinary backpack. You’re ordinary, that’s all you are. That’s what she sees.

  “Good evening, sir,” she said. “How can I help you?”