by LK Fox
I wrote an epic poem about his electric-blue eyes, his slim hips and his curly blond shoulder-length hair, but my school nemesis got hold of it and posted it online. I lured her to the toilets with the offer of a cigarette, then stuffed her head down the pan and flushed it, making her cry. It was the first time I ever stood up for myself, and was totally awesome.
Harry paid for me to go to an exclusive private school because he figured I’d be improved by my surroundings. He thought the other girls would be nicer. He had no idea about us at all. You only had to look at his current choice of partner. Karen would cheerfully pull the heads off kittens for small change. I think he looked at her and decided it was time for a bit of rough, someone who wouldn’t start reorganising the window treatments within days of moving in.
It began to rain harder, and there was nowhere to shelter. I pulled up my hood and settled by the railings to wait. Water poured under my collar, freezing my neck. Over the road, an old man was fishing the remains of a curried-rice dinner out of a polystyrene box, scooping it into his mouth with filthy fingers. I felt sorry for him. I had some coins in my pocket but when I got near him he spat at me.
There was a half-hearted shuffling sound from the crowd of girls, and I knew the studio doors were being opened. I had seen Ryder once before, coming out of a restaurant, being drunkenly dragged away by Baby. Ryder loved Chinese food. His favourite dish was sweet and sour pork washed down with vodka. I didn’t approve of him drinking so much, but there was no need for Baby to treat him like a child. He was even taller and thinner than I remembered.
It had taken months of digging to find out anything real about him, and even then I couldn’t be sure that it was all true. He was twenty-one. He was allergic to cats. He’d been born in London but had spent time in America. His father was American, and he had lost his English mother to cancer when he was twelve. He bought his clothes at a store called Poison Angel. He had a tattoo of a Komodo dragon on his arm. He admired the poet Keats. He hated broccoli. I loved cats and broccoli, but I figured we could still work it out.
When we finally met and it turned out that he liked me and we started going out together, I decided I wouldn’t stop him enjoying himself. But I wouldn’t let him get drunk in public because haters were always waiting to take really nasty pictures they could put online. I would be his manager as well as his girlfriend, someone he could share everything with. He would go on tour and I would go to college, and afterwards we would live in the country and raise a family, and do concerts in Africa to raise money for famines and medicine and stuff.
I thought this was the best chance I could possibly get to meet him. I put down my hood, ready to get a proper look. The glass doors twanged open and here they came, shouting and bashing into each other, still energised from the performance. They hadn’t changed from their stage outfits. Baby turned to the others and bellowed as if they’d all gone deaf.
‘Did you see the cameraman? All over the place! He was like, ninety!’
‘And they cut us off halfway through,’ said Skar. He was the drummer; basically, a groupie.
Ryder appeared between them with a bottle of J&B whisky in his fist. He wore a black knee-length leather jacket with short sleeves that showed off his dragon tattoo. His fanned-out hair was unnaturally white-blond, even in the dim afternoon light. The look was old-school, but I loved him all the more for staying with it.
Even from this distance, I could see the seashore blue of his eyes. I wanted them to turn towards me. I pushed down my hood and stepped forward, trying to be seen, but a girl was standing in my way. She wasn’t even looking at the band but was texting. Her phone threw a ghostly light on her bloated face.
Baby was stomping about and instantly took control, grabbing Ryder’s arm and pulling him away from the others. I checked out her sad old glittery corset and the cheap-looking Beyoncé boots she could hardly walk in. She hauled Ryder out through the gates and on to the pavement before gluing her mouth over his. She couldn’t leave him alone for a minute. There was nobody here taking pictures – why did she even bother?
I placed a silent witch-curse on her, rubbing one forefinger over the other. Pulling himself free, Ryder looked back along the street. Suddenly, he caught sight of me standing against the wall in the rain, and he stared.
He stared straight at me. I froze. I didn’t know what to do.
In that second, it was as if he could see right inside my head. He smiled at me, that thick-lipped mouth widening to reveal perfect white teeth. It was like the sun coming out. I was wearing a brace, so I didn’t smile back.
Baby caught the look. She snatched the bottle from her singer’s hand and threw it in my direction as hard as she could. The bottle exploded against the wall behind me, just above my head. I was showered with whisky and broken glass.
I looked down. It was like I was covered in diamonds, in stars. There were crystal fragments all over my raincoat. I carefully picked them off and flicked them into the gutter, like I didn’t care. By the time I looked up again, Ryder and Baby had crossed the road and were almost out of sight.
I prayed for a bus to come roaring along and mount the kerb and smash Baby into a twisted, bloody pulp.
After watching for a moment more, I turned to leave. It wasn’t until I put up my hood and brought down crimson fingers that I even realized I was bleeding.
I carefully wiped my forehead clean with a paper tissue and set off home. The wound didn’t hurt, and it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He had seen me and smiled. He had looked into my soul. He had smiled so much that poor, worn-out old Baby had felt threatened. How totally, amazingly, utterly cool was that?
I wanted to pick at the cut so it never healed. I wanted it to scar and stay with me for ever.
On the way home, I decided that being hit in the face with a broken bottle wasn’t quite so cool after all. Later, I realised I should have had stitches. I was left with a jagged red mark on my head that I had to cover with some of Karen’s make-up.
*
Obsessions with singers don’t usually last, but mine did for a while longer. I didn’t want to tattoo his name at the base of my spine or anything like that, although I still wrote all his lyrics inside my notebooks. But the reality I had seen that day – that he was crass and messy and hung around with skanks – wasn’t for me. I had plans for myself: I wanted to work in theatre design. I wanted a husband and children (two girls) and a nice home. Being stuck in a coach full of drunk roadies didn’t feature in my plans.
There are times in your childhood when nothing seems to change. That summer was like being adrift on an open sea. Karen still hung around the house doing nothing. Harry still came home from work at 10 p.m. reeking of whisky. I came top of the class in English, drama and art, and somewhere near the bottom in maths and biology.
I made some new friends – one in particular. Tamara Wilkinson was almost a full year older than me, and lately she’d started looking a whole lot more mature. Her father was in the diplomatic service, and her mother was an opera singer. Between them, they had mapped out a detailed future for their darling daughter, so of course Tamara started dating age-inappropriate boys and getting into all kinds of trouble.
I knew I probably shouldn’t hang around with her, but she seemed to like me and, as I had no other friends, I traipsed about after her like a slave. We began doing all the things girls aren’t supposed to do, like smoking cigarettes (revolting; never took the smoke down), drinking (rum, cider, white wine, beer . . . I threw up on a bus) and on one occasion, a spliff (made me feel like I was on a roller coaster, left me with a dry mouth and a raging headache).
The one part of our crash course in misbehaviour that eluded me was sex. While Tamara trotted off on mysterious dates with older boys she’d only just met online, I remained in the background, jealous, paralysed with fear.
We went to a teen club together, and I watched in amazement as she and her friends went up to a group of boys and, minutes later, started kissing them
. What shocked me most was that Tamara didn’t seem at all fussy about whose tongue was in her mouth. She didn’t ask questions about them or even get to know them first.
Then she told me she was doing full sex with the son of one of her father’s friends, and she showed me a picture of a man who looked about forty (he was actually twenty-six). She said, ‘You might have more luck with boys if you stopped mooning over Z-list singers. I know loads of boys who’d like to go out with you.’
But the more she suggested it, the more I resisted. It was the idea of being set up that I hated, and the frightening thought that, if I did meet someone I liked, he’d want to do it and I might not, so there’d be this awkward thing between us.
One night, after going out with Tamara and her friends, I got in thinking that everyone would be asleep, only to find Karen and Harry waiting in the lounge for me. It was twenty to twelve, so I was well past curfew. Harry wanted to know if I’d been drinking, had a cigarette or been on a night bus, which he seemed to think were the most disgusting things a girl could do. There was no mention of boys – not that he needed to worry, as I was still unable to bring myself to talk to them.
After he’d expressed his disgust and disappointment with me, he went off to bed, leaving Karen to ‘have a proper word’.
‘Of course you should be having fun at your age. I know I was,’ Karen told me, taking the big-sister role, which she really wasn’t cut out for, especially in that lipstick. ‘But if you’re going to see boys, you’d better be careful, ’cause they don’t respect young girls.’
‘It’s okay,’ I assured her. ‘I don’t want to start dating. I have exams coming up.’
‘All right, but there’ll come a time when you’ll want to put away your teddy bears and start hanging out with people of the opposite sex,’ she said, patting my arms with her nail-claws and sounding like some kind of weird old sex instruction manual. ‘You’re only young once and you should be enjoying yourself, but you don’t want to get – you know.’ She stared at my stomach meaningfully. This was the closest we ever got to discussing sex.
‘Thank you, Karen,’ I said politely. ‘I’m quite happy with my books and my music for now.’
‘That reminds me,’ she said. ‘That singer you like, what’s his name?’
I had to think for a minute, because we’d never once discussed who I liked or didn’t like, so the fact that she was showing an interest caught me by surprise.
‘You mean Ryder?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, that’s him. He’s appearing somewhere nearby. What did I read it in? Maybe you and I should go together and have a girls’ night out.’
I couldn’t think of doing anything more horrifically embarrassing, short of standing in the street naked, but I nodded and agreed. Then I raced to my bedroom and went online to try and find out where he was on.
When I finally found details of the gig, I couldn’t help but notice that the venue was not the kind of place an impressionable, privately educated young lady should ever visit.
But I thought it would somehow be okay if I went with Tamara, so we arranged to go along. Which turned out to be just about the worst decision of my life.
Nick
I kept thinking I’d made a mistake, but the evidence was there in the photograph.
The BMW driver had refused to catch my eye and had been desperate to get away. The first thing I needed to do was check with the school, and then, if Gabriel wasn’t there, I had to call the police.
I knew I’d make the kind of mistakes people always make when they act on the spur of the moment. I couldn’t find my private number for Mrs Arnold – I thought it was in my phone but it wasn’t there now – so I called on her office line and was then redirected, but, as usual, there was no answer.
I tried the school’s main switchboard and waited, and waited. Gabriel was due in art class with a teacher called – what was her name? Godwin. It was his favourite subject. I asked to be put through to the studio room where they were taught.
I’d been into the classrooms on open days. I can still recall the teacher’s face when she met Gabriel’s two daddies for the first time. She kept looking at us as if to say, Where’s the mother?
The assembly hall been repainted a thousand times but was still depressing. Instead of poster-paint pictures of houses and rockets, there were now drawings of melting polar ice caps, acid rain falling on starfish and dolphins dying in nets. The police had put in a new knife arch and it tended to bottleneck everyone on arrival. A knife arch.
Eventually, a harassed young woman answered the phone. It sounded as though there was a gang riot going on in the background. I explained that I was a parent of one of her pupils. I asked her, ‘You’ve got them for art, haven’t you?’
‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘and they’re about to take the lids off their jars of poster paints, so you’d better be quick.’ The woman sounded Indian, which I was sure couldn’t be right.
‘Have you got a boy called Gabriel Maddox there?’
I could hear her hesitation.
‘Small for his age, brown hair that’s too long – we were supposed to get it cut at the weekend.’ I realized I was failing to marshal my thoughts in logical order.
‘You say you’re a parent?’ She seemed flustered, as if she was being tested.
‘Nick Maddox.’ I talked her through the whole deal. ‘Who am I speaking with?’
‘Parminder Sengupta. I’m the supply teacher, I’m just going from today’s roll-call. Mrs Godwin isn’t here. She’s got a hospital appointment.’
‘Miss Sengupta, my boy is wearing a bright blue football sweatshirt that says “Chicago Bears” across the front in big red letters. You can’t miss him. He should be in your class.’
‘No, we have no one like that. I don’t know that name. Perhaps you made a mistake.’
‘You think I don’t know my own son?’
‘Well, I can see them all from here. Nobody’s gone out, they’re all in attendance except for – oh, hang on, you’re right. It looks like we’re missing one pupil.’
‘How do you know?’
‘We have an empty place. They’re working in pairs so I have to—’
‘Do you know who the empty place belongs to?’
‘Well, there are two brothers and they look alike; I can only see one of them. They’ve already been signed off the assembly register but we haven’t done the class roll-call. If you can hold for a moment I’ll check—’
She couldn’t have sounded more stressed if she was being held at gunpoint. I listened to the screaming children. It was just another school day for them, another class drawing dinosaurs, chucking paint around. The kids had no idea what could happen, how easily they could suddenly find themselves in danger. Parminder Sengupta came back on the line. ‘We’re missing a boy called Mohammad al Khafadji. All the other pupils are accounted for. I don’t have your son down on the register. You’re sure—’
‘Of course I’m sure.’
I listened for a minute while it sounded as if she was having a very public nervous breakdown. Then I grew impatient and cut her off.
With no immediate help from the school, the next thing I needed to do was call the police. But I didn’t. Instead, I went over it all again.
Gabriel gets out of car. Goes through school gate. Goes up steps. Stops. Looks back. Goes through doors. So, no, he couldn’t have been taken.
But I thought again.
Gabriel gets out of car. Goes through school gate. Goes up steps. Stops. Looks back. I drive off.
I didn’t see him go through the doors. I’d seen him do it a million times before, but not this time. Not this time. Habit makes you complacent.
It was his birthday. He hadn’t wanted to go to school. Could he have decided to go somewhere else?
I called Ben on his direct line. I got a warning even before I had a chance to say anything. ‘I’m about to go into a presentation. This had better be good.’
I paused. Ben could see arou
nd corners. He always knew when something was up. I tried to keep my calls to a minimum these days, but lately he’d grown reluctant to field them at all.
‘You’d better tell me why you called, Nick, or I’ll have to hang up on you,’ he warned.
For a moment, I couldn’t think what to say. I tried to speak clearly and sound reasonable. ‘It’s Gabriel. He’s gone.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I dropped him off at school, we were running late, I wasn’t concentrating—’ I realised I needed to get it out fast, to explain properly before he could cut me off. ‘Gabriel got into someone’s car – the guy grabbed him, I don’t know, it must have happened very quickly. I sideswiped the vehicle, I only realized he was in the back when I checked the screen-shot on my phone.’
‘Nick,’ he said, ‘you never make much sense at the best of times, but if this is some kind of tasteless joke—’
I ploughed on. ‘He looked frightened. His hand was on the window, as if he wanted to reach me. I saw him, Ben. I mean, I didn’t see him when I was there, I’ve got him in the photo I took. I called the school and spoke to a teacher, but he wasn’t in class. We have to find him before—’
He cut across me. ‘Are you going to suggest calling the police, Nick? Why would we do that, after everything? Christ almighty.’
I pleaded with him. ‘We have to tell someone.’
‘How much did you have to drink last night?’ He knew I’d been out with Matthew, my business partner.
‘I got pretty wasted and – I might still have been a bit drunk this morning —’
‘Are you drunk now? Because if that’s true then you’ve really got to—’
‘Ben, our son is gone. Do you understand what I’m telling you?’
He told me right then not to do anything crazy, not to do anything at all. ‘Just stay there, stay right there. Don’t move a muscle. I was about to go in to a meeting, so let me just make an excuse, okay?’