Bear Necessity

by James Gould-Bourn

  “Will, I’m just going to open your door a little bit and leave the pizza inside, okay?” he said, his voice slow and clear like that of a hostage negotiator. “I promise I won’t come in. I’d try to slide it underneath, but I asked them to double up on everything so I don’t think it’ll fit. Is that okay with you? Tell me if it’s not okay.”

  Will didn’t respond, so Danny opened the door and pushed the deep-pan Hawaiian inside, nudging it with his fingertips like a novice zookeeper feeding a tiger. He peered into the room, readying himself to slink away at the first sign of a death stare, but what he saw instead unnerved him far more than any hateful expression that his son was capable of mustering, and the boy had quite the repertoire.

  Will’s bedroom was clean. Not spotless. Not even close to spotless. More dirty than clean actually, but still cleaner than it should have been at that time of day. Will had a tradition that Liz had dubbed “the cleansing ritual,” which Danny always found to be a rather philosophical interpretation of their son’s habit of scattering his uniform around his bedroom the moment he arrived home from school every day, but there was no limp tie draped over the lamp and no sock perched on the door handle. His schoolbag was also nowhere to be seen.

  “Will?” said Danny as he stepped through the door, but even before he opened his mouth he knew he was speaking to an empty room. Will wasn’t on his bed. Nor was he at his desk, or under it, or behind the door, or anywhere else for that matter. The only proof that Danny could see that Will had even been home was the nameplate on the floor, and that could have fallen off that morning, for all he knew.

  Returning to the living room, he grabbed his phone and checked for any missed calls or messages. Finding none, he dialed Will’s number, but the call went straight to voice mail. He tried several more times, each time with the same result.

  Guessing he was probably with Mo, Danny called the boy’s dad, Yasir, an estate agent with a permanent smile and glasses even thicker than his son’s, but the man said Mo was at home watching Animal Planet and hadn’t seen Will since school.

  “Everything okay?” said Yasir. Lions could be heard devouring something in the background.

  Reassuring Yasir that everything was fine and trying to sound confident about it, Danny thanked him and hung up.

  “Don’t panic,” he said to himself, repeating the words like a mantra in the hope that hearing them spoken aloud might help to slow his quickening pulse, but hearing the word panic over and over only made matters worse.

  He took a deep breath and urged himself to stay calm and think logically. It was barely eight o’clock and it was still light outside, two facts he took comfort in. He also told himself that even though this was massively out of character for Will, his son had left the house that morning angrier than Danny had ever seen him, which meant that he was almost certainly still angry now, which meant he probably didn’t want to see the person who had made him angry to begin with, which most likely explained why he hadn’t come home yet. Danny couldn’t overlook the countless occasions he himself had gone AWOL when he was young—even younger than Will—often as a result of quarrels with his parents, or quarrels between his parents. Nothing bad had ever happened to him during those times of self-imposed exile, and he always came home eventually, usually when he was tired, or hungry, or when the fire that burned in his belly was no longer warm enough to keep the chill from his bones.

  Reassured by this, Danny took a seat on the couch and waited for the rain to wash Will out from wherever he was hiding and dump him cold and wet on the doorstep. He stared at his phone and listened for the front door, certain that Will would be home any second; but as thirty minutes passed, and then doubled, Danny became increasingly restless, especially as the sky grew dark. Unable to wait any longer without drumming a hole through the floor with his foot or shredding the arms of the couch with his nails, he grabbed his still-wet jacket from the chair and ran back out into the pouring rain.

  He aimed for the wooden house in the children’s play area where Mo and Will liked to sit sometimes after school, despite having to fold themselves almost in half to fit inside, but all he found were some empty nitrous oxide canisters and the damp remains of a Happy Meal. He checked the row of garages behind their flat, some of which had been prised open with crowbars by sinewy teenagers who used them as hangout spots, hookup dens, and makeshift offices for various, mostly illegal enterprises, but Will wasn’t there either. Remembering that kids sometimes liked to root around in the pile of scrap near the bins where televisions, rotting furniture, and other household items were often dumped by tenants or landlords, he went there next, his heart pounding through his jacket and his feet slapping through the muddy puddles, but all he found were a couple of cats hiding from the rain beneath a three-legged table.

  Danny ran up and down the apartment stairwells and along every corridor of every level of the building until his thighs ached and his lungs burned and his throat was sore from shouting Will’s name and yelling at people who were yelling at him for shouting. He wanted to scour every corner of the city, to navigate every dark alley and every busy road, to search every shady park and every neon underpass, but he didn’t know where to begin and knew he had more chance of counting the raindrops than he did of finding Will by blindly walking the streets. He felt as helpless as he had when his son was lying comatose in the hospital and Liz was in the morgue; and the worst part was knowing that no matter how much he appealed to a God he didn’t believe in, and no matter how much he tried to convince himself that the world was a fair and just place that functioned according to logic and not according to chance, nothing he said, nothing he did, and nothing he quietly muttered in prayer could change the course of what was unfolding.

  Pausing to catch his breath, he gripped the railing and stared through the rain towards the hazy skyline of Central London. Since the moment he’d discovered that Will was missing, Danny had guessed that their fight was to blame, but the longer he stared at the dark mass of buildings that loomed on the horizon, the more his mind drifted to the darker corners of his imagination. He thought about all the bad things that shouldn’t happen to good people but did, and all the bad people who should obey the law but didn’t. He recalled all the ugly mug shots and grisly headlines he’d seen in the newspapers over the years, and all the grim reports he’d heard from dour newsreaders and TV presenters urging people to come forward with information. He pictured all the missing-person posters taped to lampposts and walls and bins and electricity boxes that he’d passed in his life without so much as a glance, and he imagined Will’s face on one of them, his image torn and weather-beaten, flapping in the wind and ignored like the others.

  As the excruciating realization dawned on him that Will might not have disappeared by choice, he reached into his jacket, ready to call the police, a call he hadn’t wanted to believe was necessary until then; but patting his pockets and finding them empty, Danny realized he’d left his phone at home.

  Racing along the corridor and almost losing his footing as he barreled down the stairwell four steps at a time, he reached the front door and fumbled with his keys, cursing himself for every wasted second as he dropped them twice and repeatedly missed the lock until, steadying his trembling hand with the other, he finally guided the key into place.

  Hoping to find a box full of pizza crusts, Danny returned to an empty flat. No sopping size sixes in the hallway. No schoolbag slumped in the corner. No uniform tossed around the carpet. No angry eleven-year-old waiting to ignore him. He grabbed his phone from the table and made the call that every parent dreaded.

  “What service do you require?” said the female operator.

  “Police,” said Danny.

  “One moment,” she said, putting him on hold.

  Danny flicked through the transcripts of his conversations with Will while he waited, hoping to find some previously overlooked clue that might give him an indication of his son’s whereabouts, some passing reference to a friend he’d neve
r heard of perhaps, or a hangout spot he didn’t know about; but the notes only served to remind Danny of just how close he and Will had been recently, and how far apart the two of them were now.

  “What’s your emergency?” said the operator, this time male.

  “My son is missing,” said Danny, barely able to believe the words coming out of his mouth.

  The operator began to ask various questions about Will. Name. Age. Height. Date of birth. What he was wearing when he disappeared. When he was last seen. Where he was last seen. Danny felt numb as he answered everything that was put to him, as if he weren’t actually talking but listening to somebody else answering the questions for him while he stared at the notepad in his hand. In the corner of the page, in rough scribble, he saw he’d written the word oranges. He’d underlined it twice and put a question mark at the end of it, but he struggled to understand the significance of the word until he suddenly remembered what Will had told him that day in the park. He dared to smile, but only for a second.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, cutting the operator off in the middle of a question as he hurried towards Will’s room. “It’s fine. Everything’s fine. Sorry. Sorry for wasting your time.”

  Danny ended the call and stopped in front of the wardrobe, the one place he hadn’t thought to check. He gently slid the door aside, and the unmistakable scent of Liz drifted out and embraced him for just long enough to let him know that everything was going to be okay. Will was curled up in the corner with his head resting on his backpack. He still wore his shoes and uniform, and his headphones were over his ears. He didn’t move when Danny found him. He didn’t even look at him, too deeply asleep to realize he’d been found or to understand he’d been missing in the first place. Next to his foot was a small plastic container with an orange lid beside it, the type Liz had kept on her bedside table along with her phone and whatever book she happened to be reading at the time. The jar was empty save for a small dab of hand cream at the bottom, just about the amount she used first thing in the morning or last thing at night.

  Danny screwed the lid back on and thought about waking Will, but noticing how peaceful he looked, he quietly closed the wardrobe door and tiptoed out of the room.

  CHAPTER 29

  Danny had never been insulted by a pigeon before. He’d never been insulted by any kind of animal as far as he could recall, but as he squinted against the sunlight that streamed through the open curtains and looked at the pigeon that was currently eyeballing him from the ledge outside his window, cocking its head from left to right as if contemplating one or all of life’s biggest conundrums, Danny felt strangely confident that this bird, despite its seemingly innocent appearance and its biological inability to form words, had nevertheless just called him a fuckbag. Only when he heard Krystal yelling through the letterbox did he understand where the insults were coming from.

  “Open up, you fucking pillock!” she shouted. Danny could hear the door shaking, perhaps from fear or perhaps from the fist she was hammering against it. “I know you’re in there!”

  Snatching the clock from the bedside table, Danny cursed when he saw the time. Realizing he’d forgotten to set an alarm and was consequently two hours late for dance practice, he leapt out of bed, threw on some clothes, scurried down the hallway, and opened the door.

  “I can explain,” he said. Krystal’s fist was suspended in the air and he flinched, unsure if her knuckles were destined for the door or his nose.

  “You’ve got ten seconds, after which time I’m going to mace you,” said Krystal. She pulled a tiny canister from her bag and aimed it at the gap between Danny’s eyebrows. “I’ve got to warn you, though, unless you have a fucking good excuse, and by ‘good’ I mean, I don’t know, you were arrested for pissing in a policeman’s helmet, or you were kidnapped by sex traffickers and then returned because nobody wanted to buy you, then there’s a very high chance that you’re going to be spending the rest of the morning pouring milk in your eyes.”

  “Why milk?”

  “It helps to stop the burn.”

  “Got it,” said Danny. “Can we do this inside though? We’ve got neighbors. And, well, the milk’s in the fridge.”

  Krystal thought about this for a moment. “Okay, move it,” she said.

  Danny backed down the hallway. Krystal followed him into the kitchen.

  “One thing,” said Danny. “Does it matter if it’s full-fat or semi-skimmed? Because I’ve only got semi—”

  “Ten seconds.”

  “Okay, okay. Will went missing last night. I couldn’t find him anywhere, I called the police and everything. I didn’t get home until late and, well, I guess I forgot to set my alarm. There.”

  Danny waited for Krystal to holster her weapon. She didn’t.

  “Five,” she said.

  Danny frowned. “Five what?”

  “Four.”

  “I just told you everything!”

  “Three.”

  “Wait!”

  “Two.”

  “Can you at least answer my question about the milk?”

  “One.”

  “I was kidnapped by sex traffickers!”

  “Nice try,” said Krystal. She mashed the nozzle and Danny screamed as the jet hit him right between the eyes. He clawed at his face while she casually retrieved a carton from the fridge.

  “Here,” she said, handing him the milk. Danny grabbed it, and Krystal laughed as she watched him pour it over his head.

  “Was that really necessary?” said Danny as he wiped his face with a tea towel.

  “Spraying you with Silly String, you mean? Or letting you pour milk all over your head?”

  “Silly String?!” said Danny, only then noticing the matted mess of colored threads stuck between his fingers.

  “You didn’t really think I’d waste a decent can of Mace on you, did you?” she said, returning the canister to her bag.

  “I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be flattered by that or not.”

  “Seriously, you should have seen your face. It was literally the most pathetic thing I’ve ever seen. I wish I’d filmed it, that shit would have gone viral for sure. Actually, can we do it again?”

  “We’re out of milk.”

  “Shame, I was gagging for a brew.”

  “Forgive me if I don’t give you any sympathy.”

  “An apology will do,” she said.

  Danny laughed. “An apology?” he said. “For what?”

  “Hmm. That’s a tough one. Let me think for a second. Oh yeah! That’s right, for fucking leaving me hanging around Fanny’s on a fucking Saturday morning, otherwise known as my fucking day off, that’s fucking what.”

  “Yeah, well, I’d say we’re pretty fucking even,” said Danny as he wrung the milk from his T-shirt. “And anyway, I told you why I couldn’t make it. If that’s not a good enough reason, then I don’t know what is.”

  “I thought you just made that stuff up so I wouldn’t mace you,” said Krystal.

  “I wish I was making it up,” said Danny. He grabbed a few bowls and a box of Coco Pops and carried them to the table.

  “What happened?” she said, taking a seat.

  Danny sat opposite and explained everything: the fight in the morning, Will going missing, running around in the rain, calling the police, and finally discovering where he was hiding.

  “Wait, so he was here all along?” said Krystal.

  “Yep. Fast asleep in the wardrobe.”

  “That is hi-lar-i-ous,” she said, turning one word into four. “I mean, it’s terrible, obviously, but it’s also kind of funny, right?”

  “No,” said Danny. “It’s not.”

  “Just a tiny little bit?” She measured a tiny little bit with her thumb and forefinger and peered at him through the gap. Danny stared at her. Krystal sighed.

  “All right, serious Simon, whatever,” she said. “So where is he now? In the cupboard? Under the table?”

  “Right here,” said Danny as Will shuffl
ed into the living room with the hairstyle of somebody who had just spent the night in a wardrobe. “Morning, mate.”

  Will said nothing as he stared at Krystal.

  “Hello, trouble,” she said. “You must be Will.”

  Will nodded, trying to look at her without actually looking at her like he sometimes did with Victoria’s Secret window displays.

  “You never said he was so good-looking,” Krystal said to Danny. “Look at his eyes, they’re bluer than a bishop’s balls.”

  Danny frowned at her.

  “What? They are! You sure he’s yours?”

  “He takes after his mum,” said Danny, nodding towards the framed photograph of Liz.

  “Lucky for you,” she said to Will. “Hope you got her brains too.”

  “Very funny. Will, this is my friend Krystal.”

  “Pleasure’s all mine,” she said as Will bashfully shook her hand. “I’m not actually his friend, by the way. Your dad doesn’t have any friends. I bet you do, though, don’t you? I bet all the girls want to be your friend.”

  Will laughed nervously. He somehow managed to shrug, nod, and shake his head all at the same time.

  “Sleep okay?” said Danny, attempting to change the subject before his son turned any redder.

  Will ignored him and reached for the Coco Pops. “Can you ask my dad to pass the milk please?” he said to Krystal.

  “You got a mouth, ain’t you?”

  “I’m not talking to him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s a liar.”

  “He’s a thief too. You know he stole money from me?”

  “I didn’t steal it,” said Danny. “I said I’d pay you back.”

  “Whatever. Milk.”

  Danny passed the carton to Krystal, who passed it to Will, who upended it over his bowl and watched a sad trickle of milk dribble onto his cereal.

  “Can you ask my dad why there’s no milk?” he said.