by Kevin Brooks
I might not have known what I was looking for – although, thinking about it now, I think part of me probably knew – but whatever it was, and whether I knew about it or not, there was no doubt in my mind where to look for it. So I didn’t bother checking out any of the downstairs rooms – most of which were piled up with packing crates and cardboard boxes anyway – I just went straight up the stairs, straight along the landing, and straight into Nicole’s bedroom.
It hadn’t been all that long since I’d last been in Nic’s room – two years ago, maybe three at the most – but there was nothing about it now that held any memories for me. In fact, I wondered for a moment if I’d got the right room. It felt kind of strange, standing there looking around, trying to remember the room as it used to be… when I was thirteen or fourteen, when I’d sit around in here with Eric and Nic and Pauly and Raymond, or sometimes with just Nic… just the two of us, me and Nicole, alone together, in her room…
In this room.
But it wasn’t the same room any more.
It was Nic’s room, I realized now. There were no cardboard boxes in sight, so she obviously hadn’t started packing yet, and as I gazed around the room I started recognizing some of her stuff: her make-up things strewn all over the dressing table, bottles of perfume, boxes of jewellery, bracelets and necklaces hanging on hooks on the wall. And the clothes, piled in heaps around the floor, they were definitely Nic’s clothes. And the theatre posters, the black walls, the arty ornaments, the bookshelves lined with Shakespeare, Chekhov, Brecht. It was Nic’s room, all right. There was no doubt about that. But it wasn’t the thirteen-year-old Nic’s room. That room was gone for ever.
What are you looking for?
I carried on looking around the room for a while, trying to ignore the pounding in my heart and the skin-tingling jelliness of my legs, then I took a deep breath and forced myself to go over to the dressing table. Nicole has never been the tidiest person in the world, and I wasn’t surprised by the chaotic mess on her table. It looked as if she’d been to a car-boot sale and bought a Variety Box of Girls’ Stuff, then come back home, lifted the box over her head, and emptied the contents on to the table. I knew what some of the stuff was – tubes of lipstick, mascara, eyeshadow – but most of it meant nothing to me. It was just stuff: pots, tubs, bottles, packets, sachets, tins, tiny little boxes… all of it dusted with fine sprinklings of powder. White powder (talcum?), pink powder, sparkling metallic powder. I stood there, looking down at it all, trying to find whatever it was that I was trying to find… and I suppose I must have known what it was, because after a while I found myself reaching out and picking up a slender glass bottle with a flat black top. It was a small cylindrical bottle, about the size of a cigarette lighter, and it was made from shiny black glass. The word JOJANA was written in faint grey script on the front, so I guessed that was the name of the perfume: JOJANA.
I unscrewed the top, held the bottle to my nose, and breathed in the scent.
Everything seemed to change then. The atmosphere of the room, the heat, the silence… it was all suddenly different. Different time, different place. Different feelings. As the dark sweetness of the perfume filled my head, I was momentarily back in the den again, alone with Nicole… alone in the darkness, in a bubble of light… inside something alive…
What happened to us, Pete?
I could feel the sweat oozing from my skin.
And then, as I sniffed the perfume again, the air got heavier, stiller, more intense, and the dark sweetness became sweet darkness, and I was smelling gas again, the gas of the wasteground, and my head was shoved down between Wes Campbell’s legs and he was squeezing my throat so hard that I thought my neck was going to break and all I could see was the white white whiteness of his jeans…
I slammed the bottle down on the table.
The visions cracked.
I was nowhere else but here.
In this room.
I was in Nic’s room, here and now, and I knew what I knew: that Wes Campbell smelled of Nicole, that they shared the same scent, and that I didn’t know what that meant.
As I started poking around through Nic’s jewellery – her boxes of trinkets, her bracelets and necklaces hanging on the wall – I tried to imagine what kind of connection there could be between Wes Campbell and Nic. Was it an indirect connection? A connection through Eric or Pauly? Or was it something more than that? A direct connection? The indirect option seemed more likely, given that Eric and Pauly both knew Campbell, but I couldn’t see how that fitted in with the perfume. As far as I could see, the only rational explanation for the perfume connection was that Campbell and Nic had some kind of direct involvement with each other. But I just couldn’t see that either. Nicole had never liked Wes Campbell. He was everything she hated. He was brutish, artless, thoughtless. He had no grace. He was the last person in the world that Nic would want anything to do with. So the idea that they shared something together, something that hinted at some kind of intimacy…
No.
It just didn’t make sense.
I stopped thinking about it then, forcing myself to concentrate instead on what I’d been staring at for the last few minutes. Because what I’d been staring at was a string of gold chains hanging on a hook above Nicole’s dressing table. There were a lot of them, at least a dozen or so, and they weren’t all the same. There were different lengths, different designs, different thicknesses. None of them were broken, and they were all pretty ordinary – much the same as any other plain gold chain – but there was no doubt that some of them were very similar to the piece of necklace that DI Barry had shown me at the police station… the broken necklace they’d found in Stella’s pocket. No doubt at all. And now I was remembering something, or at least I thought I was remembering something… it was hard to tell the difference any more. I didn’t know if the flickering memory that I was seeing now, a memory of Nicole on Saturday night, with a fine gold chain round her neck… I didn’t know if it was a real memory, something that I’d actually seen, or if I was simply imagining it.
Making connections.
A gold chain glinting on a pale-skinned neck…
I couldn’t stay in Nic’s room any more. It was too confusing, too maddening. Too much. I had to leave. And as I did, I told myself that it wasn’t just time to leave Nic’s room now, it was time to leave the house. Get out of here. Go home. This place is driving you mad. And besides, Nic and Eric are probably going to be back soon. What the hell are you going to tell them if they find you in here?
But as I left Nic’s room and walked along the hallway through sunlit clouds of dust, I knew I wasn’t going to leave. It was as if I’d already seen myself stopping at Eric’s room, opening the door, and going inside. And because I’d already done it, there was nothing I could do to stop myself. I had to do it. My future was already set. And you can’t start messing around with your future, can you?
Eric’s room stank of cigarette smoke. It also smelled of something else, something that reminded me of something, but the smell of cigarettes was so overpowering that it was impossible to tell what it was. Even so, I somehow got the impression that it was a human smell, a bodily smell, the smell of someone else, and when I looked over at Eric’s bed I realized I was probably right. It was a double bed, and it wasn’t made up, so I could see that there were two pillows on either side, and I could also see that there were two distinct impressions in the mattress. Two people had slept there. One of them, the one who’d slept on the right-hand side, had left a half-finished joint and an opened can of beer on the bedside table. On the other bedside table, the one on the left, there was a paperback book (Les Fleurs du Mal), a glass of water and an overflowing ashtray.
I guessed that was Eric’s side of the bed.
And I wondered who’d made the impression on the other side. A long-term boyfriend? A one-night stand? A mysterious twenty-five-year-old guy who Eric didn’t want anyone to know about?
I looked around the rest of the roo
m. It wasn’t as messy as Nic’s – and there was no sign that Eric had started packing either – but it was still pretty untidy. There was a computer desk, lots of books, a TV and DVD player. There were clothes on the floor, more clothes hanging neatly in an open wardrobe. There were framed prints on the wall, some of which I recognized – Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky – and a lot that I didn’t. And there was a dressing table, just like Nic’s. Only not quite so chaotic. This time I knew what most of the stuff on the table was – combs and hairbrushes, tubes of gel, moisturiser, spot cream, a mobile phone – and this time I didn’t have to stand there, looking down at it all, trying to find whatever it was that I was trying to find. I just went over to the table and picked up the phone. It was a good one – sleek and slim, silver and black – and as I flipped it open and turned it on, I could already imagine the connections clicking together.
Numbers and names.
Eric and Pauly.
Eric and Campbell.
Eric and Stella and…
‘What do you think you’re doing?’
The voice came from behind me, slamming into my head like a sudden crash of thunder, and as I spun round to face it, quickly shoving Eric’s phone into my pocket, I saw the menacing figure of Wes Campbell in the doorway. He was staring coldly at me, his eyes still and dark, and he had a dull silver Stanley knife gripped in his hand.
‘You don’t listen, do you?’ he said quietly, stepping into the room and closing the door behind him. ‘You just don’t listen.’
Twenty-one
‘So,’ Campbell said, casually tapping the Stanley knife against his leg, ‘this is what you call keeping your nose out, is it?’
‘I can explain –’
‘Yeah? What makes you think I want you to explain?’ He smiled at me. ‘I mean, I’m just a concerned passer-by, stumbling across a break-in… I’m not going to stand here and wait for you to explain anything, am I? For all I know, you might be a gun-toting maniac or something.’ He held up the knife. ‘No one’s going to blame me for defending myself, are they?’
‘I didn’t break in. The back door was open.’
‘Right,’ he grinned. ‘So if someone leaves their back door open, that makes it OK to steal all their stuff, does it? You can just walk in and do what you like.’
I shook my head. ‘I’m not stealing anything –’
‘No?’
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I came round to see Nic and Eric, that’s all. There wasn’t any answer when I rang the bell, and the only reason I came round the back was that I smelled something burning. I thought I’d better check it out.’
‘You smelled something burning?’
‘Well, yeah… I mean, it turned out it was only a bonfire, but –’
‘You checked out the bonfire?’
‘No…’
‘Why did you go into the house?’
‘The back door was open –’
‘How did you know it was open?’
‘It was wide open –’
‘No, it wasn’t.’
‘How do you know?’
His eyes narrowed then and he stepped towards me, brandishing the knife at my face. ‘You ever been cut?’ he hissed. ‘You want to know how it feels?’
‘I’m telling you the truth,’ I said, forcing myself not to move. ‘The back door was open, so I thought someone was in… you know… I just thought they hadn’t heard the doorbell ringing or something.’
Campbell touched the blade of the knife to my face. ‘I think you’re shitting me, Boland.’
‘I’m not,’ I said quietly, trying to sound calm. ‘Honest… the door was open, I went into the kitchen, called out a couple of times, but no one answered.’
‘So why did you go upstairs? Why did you come in here?’
‘I needed to use the bathroom.’
He grinned again. ‘You thought this was the bathroom, did you?’
‘No… I was in the bathroom when I heard a phone ringing in here. I thought it might be Eric.’
‘Ringing his own phone?’
I shrugged. ‘I just thought –’
‘Who was it?’
‘What?’
‘On the phone. Who was it?’
‘I don’t know. It stopped ringing just as I picked it up.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Where’s what?’
‘The phone.’
I thought I’d been doing OK until then. I was pretty sure that Campbell knew I was lying, but at least my lies had been believable enough to give him something to think about. But now… well, what could I say? I couldn’t tell him where the phone was, could I? But I couldn’t tell him that I didn’t know where it was either. I was stuck for an answer. And from the satisfied look on Campbell’s face, and the way he was pressing the knife to my face, I could tell that he knew it.
‘Get over there,’ he said, nodding at the bed.
‘Why?’
‘Just do it.’
I didn’t move. I couldn’t move. Campbell’s face was inches away from mine now. I could smell his breath, the sour breath of his lungs. I could feel him thumbing the knife blade into my skin…
‘You should have listened to me when you had the chance,’ he whispered.
I opened my mouth to say something, but before I could make a sound he’d clamped his finger to my lips and was shoving me back against the dressing table.
‘Uh-uh,’ he grinned, shaking his head at me. ‘We’re through talking now. The only noise I want to hear from you is –’
He stopped suddenly, freezing at the sound of the front door opening downstairs. Despite the pounding of blood in my head, I could hear the faint mutter of voices, familiar voices… and then the door slammed shut and I heard some keys being thrown on a table, and as the voices became clearer, moving along the hallway towards the kitchen, I breathed a silent sigh of relief.
Eric and Nic were back.
I wouldn’t say Campbell panicked, exactly, but for a moment or two I could see a burst of indecision racing through his eyes as he tried to work out what to do. He was still holding the knife to my face, and instead of just having a finger to my lips, he’d now clamped his whole hand over my mouth. I wondered briefly if he was thinking of just keeping quiet – keep quiet, stay up here, hope that Eric and Nic go out again, then get back to whatever he had planned for me. But even as I was thinking about it, his eyes fixed hurriedly on mine again and he started whispering instructions at me.
‘You tell them what you told me, OK? All that shit about smelling the fire and needing a piss, you tell them that. D’you understand?’
I nodded.
He leaned in closer to me. ‘You weren’t in here. I wasn’t in here. I found you on the landing outside the bathroom. I never touched you.’
I nodded again.
He moved the knife blade towards my mouth. ‘You say anything else and I’ll cut your fucking tongue out. All right?’
As he stared at me, waiting for an answer, I didn’t know whether to shake my head – no, I won’t say anything else – or nod – yes, all right, I won’t say anything else. So I didn’t do anything. I just looked at him, hoping he’d take it for granted that I wouldn’t do anything to risk losing my tongue.
And I suppose he must have, because after a couple of seconds he slowly removed his hand from my mouth and stepped away from me. He stared at me for a moment – his head cocked to one side, his mouth tight, his eyes drilling into mine – then he closed the Stanley knife, put it in his pocket, and went over to the bedroom door. He quietly opened it and listened for a few moments, then he waved his hand at me, beckoning me over. As I joined him at the door, he reached up calmly and grabbed me by the throat.
‘Everything’s fine,’ he hissed at me. ‘All right?’
‘Yeah,’ I croaked.
‘No problems.’
‘No.’
‘You tell them you can’t stay long, you have to get home. Right?’
‘Right.’
He let go of my throat, gave me a final glare, then he walked out on to the landing and casually called down the stairs. ‘Hey! Eric? Is that you?’
It wasn’t surprising that Eric and Nic were surprised to see us, but what was surprising was that they seemed more surprised to see me than they were to see Campbell. I might have been mistaken, of course. I mean, my state of mind wasn’t particularly stable just then, and as we joined Nic and Eric downstairs, and Campbell started explaining what we were doing there, my concentration was pretty much focused on other things. Like trying to behave normally, trying to avoid getting my tongue cut out, trying to work out what the hell was going on. So maybe my brain was just overloaded, and I was totally misreading Eric and Nic’s reaction to Campbell…
But I didn’t think so.
Campbell seemed almost at home here. Unfazed, comfortable, relaxed. Which would have been odd enough in itself, but what made it even odder was that the overall atmosphere was anything but relaxed. As we sat together at the kitchen table, I could sense all kinds of tensions between Eric and Nic and Campbell. They were the kinds of tensions that aren’t blindingly obvious – the kind that bubble away beneath the surface – but I knew they were there. I could see them, feel them, hear them. The only thing I couldn’t do was understand them.
I didn’t understand anything.
For example, when Campbell told Eric and Nic that he’d come into the house and heard a noise upstairs, and that when he’d gone upstairs to see what it was, he’d found me coming out of the bathroom… why didn’t they ask him what he was doing here in the first place? And why, as Campbell went on to explain my story about smelling the fire and finding the back door open and going upstairs to use the bathroom… why did Eric suddenly glance at Campbell with a strangely subservient look in his eyes? And why did Campbell ignore him? And why did Nic keep staring at me as if she was stuck in the middle of a secret, a secret she didn’t believe in? And why…?
‘Why did you come round here?’ Eric said to me.
‘Sorry?’
‘Why did you come round to see us?’