by Tom Trott
I think I got a couple of hours. Whatever it was it wasn’t enough. When I woke it was just starting to get light. I could hear a shower running. Shit. I had left that on. Oh well, who cares. What were they going to do? I doubted Rory would be paying his water bill any more.
With the morning light beginning to fill the tiny cubicle I could see the inside of the door for the first time.
I felt like I had been punched in the stomach. On it was a collage of photos. Of me. Some of them were photos of me and Rory when we were young. I recognised a couple from birthday parties. One of us in a classroom. The one a photographer had done from the end of secondary school.
But a few of them were recent. Clearly taken with a long lens. Without my knowledge. Without my consent. What the fuck was Rory doing spying on me!?
I was awake now.
9
It Was Real to Us
i ripped down the most recent-looking photo, which was me looking unhappy stepping out of an office building off North Road, near-ish the station. Some blustering macho recruitment manager had hired me to find out if his wife was having an affair. She was. With another woman. And I got some pretty good photos of it. When I showed him he tried to punch me. Accused me of spying on his wife. What the hell did he think he was paying me for? Then he accused me of faking the pictures. As if I would know how, I don’t even own a computer. He refused to pay, so I held him down and took the money from his wallet. Desperate times and all.
The photo was me coming out of his office. To think that Rory watched it all happen and even took photos, really pissed me off.
I rooted through his wardrobe, threw on some of his clothes, not having any choice, and stormed out of the flat. His neighbours didn’t seem to be awake yet. No one had seen me arrive, no one saw me leave.
Outside, the streets were full of rubbish, strewn with wheelie bins and recycling boxes thanks to Storm Joseph. There were some branches in the road too. I couldn’t see any trees so god knows how far they had travelled.
Still fuming, I jumped on my bike, rode hard, and practically kicked down my own door.
‘Thalia!?’ I bellowed.
She came out of the bedroom, not wearing much. It was still early and she was just getting up.
‘Where have you been?’ She was concerned rather than angry, ‘What happened to your face!?’
I brandished the photo, ‘You had better be able to explain this?’
She took it from me. ‘This looks recent,’ was all she said. She was too busy looking at me instead, ‘Have you changed your clothes?’
‘Don’t change the subject.’
‘Aren’t those Rory’s?’
‘What the hell was your brother doing taking photos of me!?’
She looked, I suppose genuinely, incredulous, ‘Why would I know?’
‘You saw him regularly enough.’
‘I don’t know, Joe. Ok?’
‘How can I believe you?’
She didn’t like that. Not at all. She was insulted by it. I saw her cool and put on that air of superiority that women do so well.
‘Do yourself a favour and shut up before I decide not to tell you something.’
I simmered down.
She told me that her mum had called less than ten minutes ago. I knew her mobile was out of battery, and there was no way my old charger would fit her modern phone, so Thalia must have given her the landline number, I certainly hadn’t.
Apparently DCI Price had banged on Elaine’s door at seven in the morning looking for information. Information about me of all people. I could see what she was thinking: I knew the victim, I went to the crime scene, I found the drugs. Maybe she thought I was far too involved, that I must be tangled up in it somehow. I felt tangled up, just retroactively. Either that or she was still trying to figure out how I recognised him three-days-bloated and without a face. I was assured that Elaine had told her nothing. I tried to believe that.
The next thing she had pressed her for though was far more interesting. Was there anywhere special to Rory? Interesting question. But Price had gone on to make a big mistake. Either Elaine had given her too many options, or she gave her nothing at all, so Price had gotten more specific. Somewhere you could hide something, she had asked. A good detective never asks you the question they want answered, they ask the other question, they ask you something you don’t want to answer and you just tell them what they want to know instead. You think you’re being clever.
Where is it!? That’s what they wanted from Thalia. And now Price wanted the same thing from Elaine. I didn’t even know what they were looking for. But I had the home advantage. I only knew one place that was special to Rory. Special to both of us. Probably best to start there.
Just inside the gates, standing on the knee-cutting tarmac playground, on the outside, that particular shade of red brick was still the same. There are no other bricks quite that colour. The stone steps worn down in the same places. The same railings still broken. It was stuck in time, unable to change. It had been like that for generations before me, and would be the same for generations to come. The same pressure, the same misery, the same desperate attempts to escape.
Never let it be exaggerated, the unusual sensation of walking into your old school. Your brain will tell you that the place has shrunk. You cannot help feeling inferior. It was here that you were chastised, bullied, never respected. Maybe it doesn’t feel that way if you were one of the spineless sociopaths who were popular at school, but I wouldn’t know.
I shuffled in the entrance and up to the reception desk, feeling everything above, but hiding it well. The receptionist, an ugly old woman who was carrying a lot of weight in what seemed to be the most inconvenient places, probably hired for her inherent ability to terrify children, looked at me over her glasses, suspicious before I had even said a word. I was probably giving off the same scent the kids did.
‘Hi there,’ I spoke quickly, ‘I’m with the council water department. A few of the homeowners whose properties back onto the field have been complaining about flooding because of the high ground water, I’m just going to check out your side.’ I dropped onto the desk a business card that read “Steven Burke, Brighton & Hove City Council”.
And with that, I was off. As I moved down the corridor I could hear her calling, ‘Sir? Sir!? You have to sign in!’ but I was already too far away for her to catch me.
The first classroom I passed was the first I had ever been in. Reception. Four-years-old. It was where I met Rory. I had already started and not made any friends. But then some time into the year, it was probably only a couple of weeks but I couldn’t remember exactly, six or so students were added to our class. I don’t remember if they were new to the school, or just the class, but they were lined up at the front and introduced.
As they went down the line our eyes met. I know that sounds like love at first sight. In a way it was, but it was a love of mischief at first sight. You can tell a naughty kid just by looking at them. Their eyes are always scanning. Looking for an opportunity. Rory was scanning the room for a potential accomplice, and I met the requirements.
Naughty kids are often class clowns, often bullies. We were neither. In fact we were the ones laughed at, the ones bullied. Bullied for being weird, for not liking the same things as everyone else. For not being able to afford the same things as everyone else. I lived off charity and Rory’s parents didn’t earn much. We were both in permanently dirty clothes. Faded, ripped, hand-me-downs. With holes you could poke your fingers through. Holes that the wind and the rain got through. The kids in the current class looked much happier than we had. They were all talking, the nice-looking woman teacher was running through some mnemonic to help them remember something or other. The classroom was a lot more colourful than I remember it being in our day. But maybe that was just my memories. If you can see the past through rose-tinted glasses, I’m sure you can see it through grey-tinted ones too. I went down past the music room, right at the broken fire extinguish
er, left at the strange papier-mâché statue. As I passed one wall I noticed behind a Plexiglas screen a picture of some students performing in a school play. One of them was someone I knew, which meant the display hadn’t been changed since I was there. That was a bloody long time. The rest of the walls were covered in posters for events that had long finished, and health and safety advice that was probably now out of date. We used to call it “poster blindness”. There was so much that you never noticed any of it. If you ever have something that you desperately want to keep secret, print it as a poster and put it on a school wall. No one will ever read it.
I stopped at the “small hall” as we called it. Because it was a hall, and it was smaller than the main hall, obviously. The best two days of my entire school-life had been spent in here. It was junior school, we were sitting in class, as normal, expecting a normal day, when we were told that we were going to the small hall. We assumed it was an assembly, they always seemed to appear out of nowhere.
When we got to the small hall, the headmaster was there. So far, so assembly. Except that all the benches and all the gymnastics equipment, the horse, beanbags, hoops, etc. had been arranged in some unusual, but also symmetrical formation. Was this some new game? Like benchball, or pirates, only far more complicated? No, apparently this was the Santa Maria, and we were the crew of Christopher Columbus, who was the headmaster. Over the next two days we proceeded to load up the ship, and then set sail, looking for the western route to Asia.
Those who seemed to get the most into it were chosen to be officers, and were given the enviable task of supervising the rest of us. Rory did a convincing impression of loading barrels of brandy onto the ship by pretending to craftily tap one and have a swig. This theft, which would earn fifty lashes on any other ship, impressed Columbus so much that he was promoted to First Mate. Thank heavens, otherwise I would have had no one to protect me.
Crewmembers who committed mistakes were given imaginary lashes, the real punishment of which was walking the length of the ship to get the lashes whilst the rest of the crew shouted abuse at them at the top of their lungs. In character, I should say, and encouraged by the head.
On the second day, several months into our voyage, the Captain announced that someone had left the lid off the cured pork, which meant that a large amount of the ship’s food supply was ruined. This news was devastating. Would we even have enough food to make land? Would we starve to death?
It was the officers’ job to find out who the lax crewmember was, and then punish them. Desperate for some of the attention that Rory was getting, I owned up to the mistake, off-hand, to someone in a small group. The news spread around the ship in seconds. The rumour was on everybody’s lips. Apparently it was Joe.
It was almost the end of the day and thankfully there was no time left to punish me. I’ve no idea what Rory would have done. The head announced that we had to return to our classrooms now, it was all over, and tomorrow would be just a normal day.
As we trudged back to the classroom, I got some of the dirtiest looks that I have ever been given. Some part of them really believed that I had done it: left the imaginary lid off the imaginary pork, ruining the imaginary food store on the imaginary ship, endangering the imaginary expedition. A crime that the headmaster had made up just to get us even further into it.
But when you’re young, fantasies are that potent. You can live in them. We had lived on that ship. It was real to us. Especially during those school days, when an hour was a day, and a day was a year.
You can live in fantasies as an adult, mind, but because they’re closer to reality they’re harder to spot.
I turned right at the small hall and exited the building by the double doors. Even the field was smaller. When we were young, to be at the other end of it was to be in another country. Miles away from anyone.
It was shared between the primary school and the secondary school, which was next door, so this field had been our playground from five to sixteen. At the end of lunch the caretaker blew a strange bugle/horn type thing, the sound of which carried across the field, across the mountains and rivers of our minds. All the way to the imaginary land we were in. Untouchable. The sound was the only thing that could travel.
Bordering the field was a thicket of trees and bushes. This was where we spent all of our time. Running, climbing, fighting. So many things had happened in here. So many things that I couldn’t tell anyone. I remember we kissed once. We just wanted to know what it felt like, people were always doing it in films. Who else could we ask? We didn’t have any girl friends, and the only person we trusted that much was each other. I think we even kissed a few times after that, I’m not sure why those ones were. It was kind of nice, sort of soft. I wondered if he remembered that. Then I remembered he was dead. So, no. No he didn’t.
I passed a tiny bush, barely as high as my waist. Recognising it, I peered down into it. It seemed hardly bigger than my head inside, but when we had first played in here, it had been our base. Our house. The game we played most often was to go out hunting dinosaurs and come back and cook them. I assume we were cavemen. Not historically accurate, I know. In another fantasy we were ancient warriors, battling against some all-powerful arch-villain who stalked us at every turn. The danger outside the safety of this bush had felt real. It was real to us. Back then it had been big enough to fit us both comfortably inside. It didn’t seem to me now that that was possible, but I remembered it that way.
As we had got older and bigger, we had needed a bigger base. This was where I was headed now. I ducked under bushes, stepped over tree stumps, following a well-worn path. Through cobwebs, over anthills. The outside was still intact. A web of threaded branches concealing an inner sanctum. It was our best attempt at building a den. A safe place. Our place.
Misery escaped through fantasy. That had been junior school. But secondary school was something much worse. Forced out of our fantasies most of the time, we were probably still naughty. We hadn’t grown out of it. I’m not sure I’ve grown out of it now.
It’s a cliché to suggest that naughty kids are naughty because they’re not challenged by what they’re learning. Mostly it’s not true in my experience, mostly they’re just arseholes. Or at least they’ve been raised by arseholes. I’m not sure what my excuse was. Or is. But Rory was genuinely smart. I used to copy his answers. That got me through all of primary school and half of secondary, it was only when we started taking exams, that I couldn’t cheat, that I decided school wasn’t for me. Without me holding him back he could do really well, he even won the electronics prize that was contested between a few different schools. College was beckoning. University. Maybe a good university. And then a good, cushy job. A wife, kids, death. All done. But he discovered marijuana. And that was that.
I muddied my knees crawling into the den through our designated entrance. More like a cat flap. I was too big now and could hear bits snapping. Once inside I was amazed quite how shit our handiwork was, I remembered it being a lot sturdier than it was. With less holes. I could see everything outside the den, and I was sure anyone could see in. What had been the point of it? Realising that it had survived over fifteen years of rain, storms, and other children, made me feel a bit better.
The place was built around a tree stump that served as our table-come-holy-shrine. The place where we swore our blood oath. We had carved our symbol into it. I scratched away fifteen years of moss and mud. It was still there. You couldn’t see it. But you could feel it. The feeling of finding it after all those years, of running my fingers over it again, was almost erotic.
At the base of the stump, where the roots had withered and died, there was a cavity. You couldn’t spot it by eye, but there had always been a cavity. When a bully or a teacher wanted something from us. When they would break open our lockers, tip out our bags, even turn us upside down and shake us, this is where we had stashed it.
I reached inside. If anything, this was bigger than I remembered. I still had to feel around to find
stuff. Amongst the bits of dried roots and the flint and the chalk, there was definitely something in there.
Footsteps! Crunching, splashing footsteps announced the presence of heavy-footed intruders. Soon the branches were being ripped from the outside. They had withstood fifteen years, but now they were just kindling.
I sat calmly on the stump, my feet covering the entrance to the cavity. And soon several pairs of burly arms, dark short-haired heads, and one blonde head came into view. She was close behind. She was always very close behind. I’d give her that.
As they ripped down the final barrier between me and them I gave them a quizzical smile, as though I lived in this hovel and really had no idea what they were doing here.
‘Everything ok?’ I asked.
Price was doubled over, panting. She must have been running.
‘Search his pockets,’ was all she said.
10
As Slippery as Wet Soap
they pulled everything from my pockets. Then they handcuffed me, and bundled me into the back of their panda car. Price was in the other car and the two driving me weren’t in the mood for much conversation, but they did want to tell me one thing.
‘You looking fucking hideous.’
‘So sue me for copyright infringement,’ I shot back. ‘You’ve got a case.’
They shut up for a bit. We were heading into town, which meant the station.
In Brighton the town planners put the Police Station, Law Courts, and Job Centre all next door to each other. That tells you everything, doesn’t it. Even town planners, famously the most gormless of idiots, can see the connection between joblessness and crime. You can walk from the Job Centre to the Police Station, to the Law Courts, then into a van to Lewes Prison. Do your sentence. Back to the Job Centre, and the cycle starts again.