by Kevin Brooks
I left the ticket office, went back down to the Underground station and jumped on a Piccadilly Line train. As the doors closed and the train headed off into the darkness, I allowed myself a little smile. By the time Ryan and his people had got to King’s Cross, surrounded the station, questioned the ticket clerk, searched the Edinburgh train and finally realized that I wasn’t there, I’d not only be somewhere else but – with a little bit of luck – I’d be someone else too.
I sat back in the seat and closed my eyes.
For the first time in what felt like ages, I knew where I was going.
9
Until all this happened, I’d never really thought about my mother that much. I’d never tried to find her, or find out who she was. I’d never felt the need to find out why she didn’t want me. What was the point? She didn’t want me. She’d left me in a pram outside a maternity hospital. As far as I was concerned, that’s all there was to it. I didn’t have a mother. She just didn’t exist.
But now…
Well, now it was different.
Now I had to think about it, because now there was a possibility that none of it was true. It was all a lie. I wasn’t abandoned at birth. I wasn’t an orphan. My mother’s non-existence had nothing to do with her not wanting me: she simply didn’t exist. I had no mother. Never did. I was just a thing – a birthless and ageless thing – and things don’t have mothers.
I was still trying to think about it as I got off the Underground train at Finsbury Park, but I couldn’t quite get hold of anything. My thoughts were floating, drifting… strangely unreal. It was as if I was stuck in a continuous awakening from a dream. Everything around me seemed detached and remote – the rainy streets, the dark skies, the taxi places and convenience stores. I was there, within it – moving, being, taking up space – but I had no natural connection to it. I had no belonging.
I started walking down Seven Sisters Road. It was raining hard now, soaking me to the skin. When I dipped my head, drops of rain dripped from my hat and I caught the drops on my tongue. They tasted cold and bitter.
I walked on, lost inside myself.
Looking for my self.
I knew I had a self, a past, a history, but it all seemed so vague – half-remembered images, broken pictures of places, people, feelings, days – and I didn’t know if it really belonged to me or not. I didn’t know what I could trust any more.
What could I trust?
All the Homes I’d ever lived in, all the foster parents, the carers, the social workers, the therapists… could I trust them? Maybe they’d never been what they seemed. Maybe they’d never been there to look after me – they’d been there to watch me instead. To observe me. To study me. Maybe they’d all been in on it from the start… whatever it was.
Maybe even Bridget was in on it.
It was painful to think about, but I knew it wasn’t impossible – that she’d been part of it, that she’d known all along, that there’d been nothing wrong with her sister on Monday…
I didn’t want to believe it.
But I just didn’t know.
I didn’t know what to believe any more.
∗
I’d nearly reached Manor House now. The park was on my left and the junction with Green Lanes was just up ahead. There was a fried chicken place across the road. I wasn’t hungry, but I hadn’t eaten for a while and I knew I ought to get something inside me. Food. Fuel. Energy.
I needed food.
My body needed food…
It didn’t make sense.
I breathed, I ate, I drank, I consumed. I excreted. I slept. I dreamed. I hurt. I was affected by drugs – alcohol, anaesthetic. I had bad feelings. Good feelings. I had desires. I got tired. I thought of things – good things, bad things, useless things. I didn’t want to die. I laughed. I smiled. I hummed, I whistled, I yawned. I followed the functional rules of an organism. But I seemed to be made from non-organic materials…
It just didn’t make sense.
It didn’t matter.
I crossed the road, bought two pieces of chicken, fries and a coffee, then took it all back over the road, went into the park and sat down on a bench.
The chicken was undercooked. Hot on the outside and cold in the middle. The fries were hard and black round the edge, and the coffee was weak. But it was all right. It was food and drink. It was fuel. It was energy.
I shovelled it down and thought about where I was going.
It’s hard to make friends when you’re moving around all the time, and I’d spent all my life moving around. Different Homes, different schools… a couple of years here, a couple of years there. I’d never spent more than a couple of years anywhere. So I’d learned a long time ago that it just wasn’t worth getting attached to anyone, because as soon as you did, they were gone. And I’d always liked being on my own anyway. I’d never enjoyed all the stuff that goes with friendship – all the rules, all the games, all the ups and downs. And, besides, even if I had been bothered about making friends, it wouldn’t have made much difference, because most people didn’t seem to like me much anyway. I don’t think they dis liked me. I mean, they didn’t hate me or anything. I think they just found me unsettling…
I read something once that one of my social workers had written about me. We were in her office, discussing my monthly report, and when she got up and left the room for a minute I leaned over her desk and sneaked a look at my file. Robert has always been a rather solitary boy, she’d written. Despite the disrupted nature of his schooling, he has a keen – if slightly strange – intelligence, and often displays a maturity beyond his years. Socially, however, he shows little interest in his surroundings, and at times can be worryingly undemonstrative and somewhat cold. Previous carers have found this discomforting, and unless Robert’s problems are addressed, his prospects of finding a long-term placement remain poor.
So maybe that’s why people found me unsettling, because I was undemonstrative and somewhat cold. Or maybe they’d always sensed something unhuman about me. Or, then again, maybe they’d just never liked me that much.
I guess I’ll never know.
Not that it matters.
All that matters – and all I’m trying to say – is that just because I didn’t have any friends, that didn’t mean I didn’t know lots of people. Because I did. I’d been to dozens of schools and dozens of Homes, and over the years I’d met thousands of people.
And one of them was a kid called John Blake.
And it was Blake who’d taken me to see Eddi Ray.
And that’s who I was going to see now.
I’d met John Blake a few years earlier when I was living at a Home on the outskirts of Chelmsford. He was a couple of years older than me, a real hard-head. One of those kids who live for the bad stuff – robbing, fighting, taking drugs. He didn’t care what he did, and he didn’t care what it did to him. He just did it. None of the other kids liked him much, and I didn’t like him either, but for some weird reason he kind of latched on to me for a while. I don’t know why, but he was always trying to get me to go places and do stuff with him. Come on, Rob, let’s go for a drink. Let’s have some fun. Come on, I know where we can get some gear…
That kind of thing.
I usually turned him down – No thanks, John. I’m all right. Yeah, I’ll see you later – but when he asked me one day if I wanted to go to London with him, I surprised us both by saying yes.
I still don’t know why I did it. Maybe I was just bored. Bored with saying no all the time, bored with never going anywhere. Bored with being boring. Or maybe it was something more than that. Maybe it was something to do with now…
Is that possible?
Could I have known things back then without being aware of it? Could I have known that John Blake was going to take me somewhere that might prove useful in the future?
I don’t know.
Probably not.
But he did take me somewhere useful.
Eventually.
He spent most of that day in London getting wrecked – drinking with his hard-head friends, popping pills in tower blocks and squats, shoplifting in Oxford Street. He tried to get me to join in – come on, Rob, have a drink, have a smoke, enjoy yourself – but I was fine as I was. Just hanging around, watching. Just being there. It wasn’t much fun and I wished I hadn’t agreed to come, but it didn’t really bother me. As far as I was concerned, it was just another time and another place.
It was some time in the late afternoon when John suddenly decided to visit Eddi Ray.
‘Hey, Rob,’ he said, ‘tell you what… let’s go see Eddi. You’ll like her, man. She’s cool.’ He was talking like that by then – like he was full of shit. Which he was. ‘She’s my brother’s ex,’ he explained. ‘Left him when he got banged up. Took over most of his business too.’ He laughed. ‘He’s going to kill her when he gets out.’
And that was about all there was to it.
He took me to see Eddi Ray.
We went to her flat in Finsbury Park.
We hung around for an hour or so, and then she threw us out.
It wasn’t much of a night to remember.
But I remembered it. Partly because Eddi Ray was really cool, and partly because she was just the kind of person I needed right now. But mostly I remembered it because no one knew that I knew her, apart from John Blake, and he’d died from an overdose about six months ago. So no one knew that I knew Eddi Ray. No one at all. And if no one knew, then Ryan wouldn’t know.
I got up off the bench, dropped the chicken remains in a litter bin and started walking.
10
Eddi Ray’s flat was on the seventh floor of a high-rise tower block in a sprawling estate called Gillespie Heights. There were about half a dozen other tower blocks on the estate and they all looked pretty much the same – cold and grey and scary. Some of the ground-floor flats had bars on the windows, others had reinforced doors. There were bicycles chained to balconies. Broken saplings. Broken needles scattered on the ground.
As I cut across a patch of grass and followed the pathways into the estate, I kept my eyes open and my hand on the pistol in my pocket.
After a while, Eddi’s tower block came into sight. It was straight ahead of me, standing tall and dark against the North London sky. In front of the tower block, a bunch of Asian kids were karate-kicking each other around a ruined playground, and a skinny Alsatian mongrel was squatting to crap by the swingless swings.
There was no one else around.
No one was watching me.
No silver eyes.
No men in suits or coats.
It was around midday now. The air felt tired and washed out.
I went inside the tower block and took the lift to the seventh floor.
The hallway was empty when I stepped out of the lift. It smelled of soup, cigarettes, marijuana, petrol and piss. Thick heavy bass booms were thumping out from a flat down below – doomp doomp d-doomp, doomp doomp d-doomp, doomp doomp d-doomp. The air was stale and the hallway was grimly lit – yellowy-white, scratched and cold. The walls seemed to lean inwards. At the end of the hallway, a bleak window showed a rectangle of rainy-day sky.
I walked towards it.
Doomp doomp d-doomp…
The beat went on.
Eddi’s flat was 722. The door was fitted with black steel mesh. As I stood there staring at it, I suddenly realized that I hadn’t given this much thought. What if she didn’t let me in? What if she wasn’t at home? What if she didn’t even live here any more?
It was too late to start worrying now.
I took off my hat and rang the bell.
After about thirty seconds, a voice called out from behind the door, ‘Who is it?’
A female voice. Sweet but hard.
I stared at the peephole in the door. ‘My name’s Robert Smith,’ I told the invisible eye. ‘I came here about a year ago with John Blake.’
‘Who?’
I hesitated, wondering what she meant. Who’s John Blake? Or who’s Robert Smith?
‘I’m Robert,’ I said. ‘I was here with John Blake –’
‘He’s dead.’
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Robert Smith.’
‘What do you want?’
I hesitated again. What did I want?
‘I’m in trouble,’ I told her. ‘I need your help.’
Silence. I could feel her watching me through the peephole, thinking about me, deciding what to do.
‘Does anyone know you’re here?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Did you tell anyone else you were coming here?’
‘No.’
‘Just a minute.’
I heard bolts thunking, chains rattling, locks unlocking… then the door finally opened and there she was – Eddi Ray. Black vest, ripped jeans. Peroxide hair, short and spiky. A sculpted face. Pale skin glinting with studs and rings.
She was a lot prettier than I remembered.
Pretty and hard.
She looked over my shoulder, checking that I was alone, then she stepped back and ushered me inside.
It was a fairly big flat. A large front room, two bedrooms, a hallway, a kitchen, a bathroom. There were locks on all the doors, and the windows were masked with heavy black curtains. The only light in the front room came from the flickering glow of countless computer monitors and TV screens. CNN played silently on a widescreen TV in the corner. CCTV images stuttered on a black-and-white portable – images of the hallway outside, the lobby, the estate. The room was filled with equipment – laptops, PCs, printers, scanners, phones, copiers, cameras, work desks, tools, piles of papers. The air hummed with electric heat.
‘You’re wet,’ Eddi said to me.
‘It’s raining.’
She nodded, smiling at me. Her smile didn’t look right – too false, too kind. I couldn’t work it out.
‘Sit down,’ she said, gesturing at a leather settee. ‘You want a drink or something?’
I shook my head. ‘I’m all right, thanks.’
I put my rucksack on the floor and sat down. Eddi remained standing. I didn’t know how old she was, but I guessed she was around nineteen or twenty. She was slim and short, strong, well balanced. Her feet were bare, her toenails painted black. She had very blue eyes. She was still smiling at me…
And that bothered me. She shouldn’t have been smiling at me. She should have been wary, wondering what I wanted, wondering what I was doing here.
‘It’s a shame about John,’ she said.
I shrugged.
She lit a cigarette. ‘You know Curt’s dead too, don’t you?’
‘Who?’
‘Curtis, John’s brother. My ex.’
‘Really?’
She nodded. ‘Never got out of prison. Got popped inside.’ She drew on her cigarette and smiled again. ‘So,’ she said, blowing out smoke, ‘what can I do for you, Robert? How can I help?’
Whatever I was, I’d lived my life by certain rules.
Never believe anything.
Never back down.
Never get used to anything.
Never trust anyone who offers to help.
Over the years, I’d expanded that last one into never trusting anyone at all, but the basic principle was still the same: charity stinks.
Selfless charity doesn’t exist. Everyone wants something. No one does anything for free. There’s always a catch.
It sounds pretty dirty, I know. But that’s how it is.
So, when Eddi offered to help me – all smiles and kind looks and caring blue eyes – I knew that something was wrong. I could feel it, sense it. I could see it in her eyes. She knew something. She was treating me like a friend, but I wasn’t a friend. I was just some kid who’d come round to her flat one night with her ex-boyfriend’s brother. It was over a year ago. I’d only stayed for an hour, barely said a word. She shouldn’t have even remembered me. But here she was, treati
ng me like a long-lost friend. And that wasn’t right.
‘Could I use your bathroom, please?’ I asked her.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘It’s just down the hall on the left.’
I could feel her watching me as I got up and crossed the room. I was trying to stay calm, trying to act as normally as possible. But I was also trying to look round her flat without letting her know that I was looking. I didn’t know what I was looking for – something out of place, something that might tell me something…
Whatever it was, I didn’t see it.
I went down the hallway and into the bathroom. I peed. Flushed the toilet. Washed my hands. Then I looked in the mirror. And as my face looked back at me – bedraggled and damp – I suddenly realized that I had seen something in the front room. I knew it. I’d seen something. I still didn’t know what it was, but I knew I’d seen something.
I closed my eyes and pictured myself leaving the room. What had I seen? Settee, carpet, computers, table…
Table.
That was it. There was a table by the door. I could see it now. A little wooden table, a telephone table or something. And on the table… on the table there was a newspaper. An Evening Standard. Folded in half. Front page. I closed my eyes tighter and focused on something at the foot of the front page… the bottom edge of a photograph… a familiar grainy photograph.
‘Shit,’ I said, opening my eyes.
My photograph was on the front page of the Evening Standard. Ryan’s false story about me – Robert Smith, frenzied attack, horrendous killing…
Eddi had seen it.
‘Shit.’
When I went back into the front room, Eddi was sitting on the settee, smoking a cigarette. I paused in the doorway and looked down at the table. The newspaper had gone. I looked over at Eddi again.
She smiled at me. ‘All right?’
I looked round the room, then put my hand in my pocket. ‘Where is it?’ I asked her.
‘What?’
‘The newspaper. Where is it?’
‘What newspaper? What are you talking about?’