by Graham Marks
In an eerie echo of what happened to Lucie Blackman in 2000, another Brit bar girl, Charlotte Grey, 25, has gone missing from a club in the Roppongi district of Tokyo where she worked as a hostess earning £100 an hour. Last seen in the company of an unidentified Japanese man on Saturday night, Charlotte, who is on a gap-year trip, was reported missing by her travelling companion after she failed to return to the flat they were sharing. Like Lucie Blackman, who was murdered by businessman Joji Obara, 48, Charlotte did not have a visa and was working illegally. Police are investigating.
‘How on earth could they have got to know so quickly, Adam?’
‘No idea, but it’s a load of crap …’ Adam closed the newspaper and gave it back to Suzy. ‘All they got right was the fact she’s missing. Her age is wrong, she’s not on a gap year and there’s no way she was earning £100 an hour, that’s just crap. Makes her sound like a complete tart, too, and they’re assuming she’s been murdered like that other girl. God, I hope my parents don’t see the story – how did you know about it? You never buy a paper.’
‘Andy showed it me, on the bus.’
‘Shit, that means the whole bloody school’ll know in two seconds flat.’
‘I asked him to keep quiet … he might.’
‘Jeez …’ It had to be Andy. Nice guy, best mate and everything, but a mouth that flapped like a duck landing on a pond. There was no way he’d keep this quiet. Adam felt like turning round and going straight home.
‘Come on, we’ll be late.’ Suzy tugged his arm and nodded towards the school entrance.
They hadn’t got more than fifty metres into the grounds when Adam heard his name being called and saw Steve Apperly, the kind of ego-heavy smartarse every year seemed to have to have at least one of.
Steve-bloody-Apperly.
Now Adam knew why he’d had a negative reaction to the news that Alice’s boyfriend was called Steve. This one was with a couple of his mates and they had a paper which they were making a big thing of reading. Adam felt his stomach knot. It had started already.
‘Hey, Adam, your sister must be quite something, right?’ Steve Apperly was pointing at the page he and his mates were reading. ‘What the hell does £100 an hour get you, fercrissake!’
‘Some froth on your coffee!’ One of the other boys smirked and dug his elbow into Steve’s ribs.
Adam felt Suzy’s grip tighten on his arm. ‘Ignore them,’ she whispered.
‘Yeah, OK, but who’s gonna tell them to ignore me, Suze?’ Adam walked on. This, he knew, could only get worse.
5
Food/Drugs/Fish/School/Etc.
Whichever way he looked at it, this had been the week from hell. At home, with every day that there was no more news from Alice in Tokyo, and precious little in the way of progress from the police, Adam watched his mum approaching catatonic basket-case status. All she did was sit quietly by the phone and stare into the middle distance. He knew she was desperate, believing that a call was as likely to bring bad news as it was worse. As likely to tell her she’d lost a parent or a child.
His dad, on the other hand, was in a permanent mood of angry impotence, verbally lashing out at him and the dog out of frustration that there was nothing he could do. That, anyway, was what it felt like to Adam, who had other problems to deal with.
News about Charlie’s disappearance had gone round college like a cold sore at a party, fuelled by an additional follow-up story in the papers on Thursday. It was basically just a re-hash of the earlier piece, along the lines of ‘Girl still missing’, only this time they’d somehow managed to get hold of a picture of Charlie. And Adam had a fair idea where they’d got it from. Steve Apperly’s older sister and Charlie had been in the same year and tutor group, added to which Steve was all of a sudden striding around in a brand-new pair of very top-of-the-line Nikes. Do the math, as Adam’s American cousin would’ve said.
For the most part the kidding had been good natured, if fairly constant and pretty low-rent. It wasn’t hard to deal with, Adam found, if you just zoned it out. But Steve Apperly and friends were a different case altogether.
They were in his face all the time. They never gave up. They never got bored. It was as if they’d made it a personal mission to use their less than barbed wit to goad him at every possible opportunity, just to see how long it would take to break him.
In the end it took four days.
Coming out of a double English tutorial – almost two solid hours of Chaucer – Adam hadn’t really been paying attention and had walked straight into the middle of Apperly and Crew. If he’d had his head in a different place he’d have spotted them and detoured, but as it was, there he was, surrounded.
‘Look who’s here …’
Adam glanced over at Steve, leaning up against a wall with a folded-up newspaper under one arm and smiling at him. ‘Yeah, what a big surprise, eh, Steve? Me, here. Who’d have thought?’
Steve pushed himself off the wall and opened the paper. ‘I see Charlie’s in the news again. Nice picture.’
Someone behind Adam laughed.
Adam looked pointedly at Steve’s feet.
‘I see you got a new pair of trainers, Steve. Did your slag of a sister buy them for her little bruv?’
‘Watch it, Grey, you leave my sister out of this.’ Steve’s ears went bright red and his whole face pinched. ‘She’s not the one giving it up for £100 an hour in some sleazoid bar in Japan, man.’
‘Right, I heard she did it for a lot less down the bogs at the Royal Oak.’ Adam looked right at one of the guys with Steve, the short one with bad acne who he figured was least sure of himself, and nodded at him. ‘You been there, Terry? I heard she does anyone, even guys with a rabid skin condition.’
Adam knew he was skating on no ice at all, antagonising both Steve and his spotty mate, but he had had it with backing off and soaking up the verbal sucker punches. This was payback time and it felt great to be giving as good as he’d been getting all week.
‘I told you!’ Steve yelled, leaning forward and shaking a vicious finger at Adam.
Adam grabbed it and bent it back further than it had ever been designed to go. ‘And I wasn’t listening …’ Adam watched Steve gasp with pain, ‘but you better had, Apperly. If you don’t cut out all this crap I’m gonna –’
But Steve never found out what Adam was going to do because Terry waded in, yelling ‘Bastard!’, and threw a wild punch that made Adam’s hand, still holding Steve’s finger, jerk forward. Steve’s scream, as his finger broke, was the signal for general mayhem to break out.
Adam found himself at the centre of a storm of windmilling fists and pummelling feet, with at least one person – he soon realised it was Terry because he was yelling ‘Bastard!’ – clinging to his back; it felt like he was trying to bite his head. Running backwards and slamming into the wall got rid of the manic, bloodthirsty limpet for the moment, but there were still three more attackers ready, willing and able to finish him off.
They circled him, warily at first – Steve and Terry, proof Adam was no pushover, were still lying on the floor – and then they started to move in on him. Word of the fight had obviously got out because, as he whirled round trying to fend off blows, Adam realised there was now a sizeable audience shouting and cheering and all but drowning out Steve Apperly’s keening wail as he lay on the floor, clutching his hand.
Adam knew there was no way he could win this fight, that he was, no doubt about it, going to come out way the worst off, but something drove him on. For every punch and kick he took he lashed out with more fury, an insistent, driven voice in his head repeating, mantra-like, ‘How dare they take the piss out of Charlie, how dare they …’ Then, as he felt his adrenaline-boosted strength draining away, through a pink mist he saw figures push their way through the baying crowd – more of Steve’s friends come to have a go? – and, realising he had nothing left, he fell to his knees, head hanging down.
They hadn’t been more attackers, but a couple of Deputy H
eads and one of the Games Masters. The three boys who’d been fighting Adam had been sent to wait outside their Head of Year’s office; Steve and Terry, who’d been knocked semi-conscious when he was smashed against the wall, were shipped off to the local hospital in an ambulance and Adam had been taken to the medical room to be checked over by the nurse.
‘Blood, sweat and tears,’ she said, cleaning up Adam’s face with a stinging medicated swab to see if there was anything worse than superficial cuts and bruises to be dealt with.
‘Not me crying, nurse.’
‘Nothing to be proud of, sending two people to hospital.’
‘I didn’t throw the first punch.’
‘Save your excuses for the powers that be, Adam,’ said the nurse, throwing the bloodied swab into a bin. ‘Now take off your shirt and let me check the rest of you – anything in particular hurt?’
‘Just everything.’
‘Anything like a sharp pain anywhere?’ The nurse pressed the left side of Adam’s bruised and grazed rib cage and watched for his reaction: nothing spectacular. ‘You certainly took a beating. What was this all about?’
‘Nothing.’ Adam stared at the fish tank over by the wall, its tiny, brightly coloured inhabitants gliding through the fake coral reef environment, looking for a way out.
‘Don’t treat me like an idiot. This was about something, Adam … was it girl trouble?’
Adam winced as the nurse pushed in on his right side. ‘Yeah, kind of …’
‘You boys, testosterone has an awful lot to answer for.’ The nurse handed Adam a glass of water. ‘Rinse your mouth out and let me check your teeth.’
‘They were dissing my sister.’
‘Sorry?’
‘My sister, Charlie … she’s gone missing. In Japan.’ Adam took a mouthful of water, rinsed and spat it out into the sink. ‘There’s been a story in the papers and those guys’ve been going at me all week, calling her a tart and stuff, and all she was doing was working in a bar. She told me –’
‘Open wide.’ The nurse shone a small torch into Adam’s mouth. ‘How long has she been missing?’
‘Almost a week now.’
‘I didn’t know, I’m sorry. I’m sure she’ll be fine, Adam.’ The nurse switched the torch off. ‘You’d better see a dentist, just in case anything’s come loose, otherwise I think you’re fine, considering. Nothing broken. Let me just dress the cuts and then, I’m afraid, you have to go and see the Headmaster.’
‘At least he can’t make me feel any worse than I already do.’
‘Haven’t you ever heard the old adage “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me”?’
‘Yeah, and “turn the other cheek”, but I’ve been doing that all week and I’d just had enough.’ Adam put his shirt back on and did it up. ‘And like I said, I didn’t start it …’
Point of view. Weird, thought Adam, how it changed from person to person, and with it, the way whatever had happened was perceived. What was actually considered to be the truth depended on the point of view of the person with the final say. Which was OK if it was the same one as yours, but that was not always the case. The truth was, ‘truth’ turned out to be a fluid thing. Malleable, like putty, it could be bent to suit whoever held sway, whoever had the biggest stick.
If this was the way it happened in his headmaster’s office, thought Adam, then why not anywhere, everywhere else? Who could you believe, who could be trusted to tell the truth? And was there ever an absolute truth? From his point of view, no.
‘Like I said, sir, I didn’t start it.’ Adam was tired and beginning to think he must sound like a stuck CD. Even he was starting to find himself as unconvincing as the Headmaster obviously did.
‘You may well think that, but two boys are in hospital because of your actions and I am going to have to suspend you until all this is properly sorted out.’ Mr Taylor rearranged some papers and a couple of pencils in front of him, then looked back up at Adam. ‘I am really very sorry to hear about Charlotte, but, however badly you feel about her going missing, your behaviour was unacceptable. You will have to stay at home for at least the next week, maybe longer, and I will be in touch with your parents.’
And that was that.
6
Make you white
Adam had considered leaving it till Sunday evening to tell his parents about the suspension – less time for accusations, aggravation and shit dumping. He also felt bad that what he’d done would only add to the crap his mum and dad were having to deal with. Suzy, who’d been waiting for him when he came out of Mr Taylor’s office, pointed out that a face covered in bruises and plasters was a bit of an advert for something being up and that he probably didn’t have the option of waiting.
Put that way Adam had to agree, and went straight home to face the music, which turned out not to be as bad as he’d imagined it might. Strange, he thought, how you never seemed to be able to second-guess how parents were going to react to what you’d done. Often they blew their collective stack over the most trivial thing, going totally ballistic about some microscopic event – which, apparently, you’d been told about a million and one times before – and then they could act so calm about something heinous you’d done, it was hard not to believe they’d gone temporarily deaf and hadn’t heard what you’d told them.
His dad’s reaction to the events at school – a raised eyebrow, a small, wry smile, a pat on the back and the reassurance that everything would be sorted out – led Adam to believe he’d felt like punching someone out, too. That, like Adam, his dad somehow felt better for the action Adam’d taken, even if it had achieved nothing positive. He hadn’t shouted at him, or anything.
Adam’s mum had cried again, but then got very busy, insisting on changing all the plasters, saying that she’d ring the dentist first thing in the morning and also make an appointment for him to be checked out by the family’s GP. He started trying to tell her he was all right, but it dawned on him that this was the first time in a week he’d seen his mum so energised. She had something to do, someone to look after; someone right there she could actually take care of. So he let her.
Up in his room, Badger curled in a ball under his desk, farting silently, Adam logged on and checked his email. Nothing new from Charlie. But, because it was still there, he opened up the last message he’d had from her and stared at it.
Tokyos amazing, Ad!!!!!! Alice, Steve and me have this t-i-n-y place (still costs a bloody fortune) and were working in a place called the Bar Belle, Ali and me anyway. Steves got a gig at a kebab stand (yes, tyhey have doner kebabs here!!!!). Were on the late shift, but thats when the tips are best – the punters are so pissed they dont know what theyre giving you a lot of the tiem!!! This areas called High Touch Town, but dont get the wrong idea all we do is serve drinks and talk to customers, blokes in suits (they all look the same Ad, honest to god) who just seem to think its SO COOL to sit and chitchat with us!!! Got to go, and remember, for godssake don’t breathe a word to M+D! Chasxxxxxx
Re-reading it – classic Charlie style, full of spelling mistakes and exclamation marks, empty of punctuation – he could hear her voice, feel her enthusiasm, touch her spirit. With Charlie everything had to be fast – like even though Charlie was short for Charlotte it wasn’t short enough, and she always signed herself ‘Chas’. Adam couldn’t imagine that this message, these few words up on his computer screen, would be the last he’d ever hear from her.
How could she be missing? Maybe she and Alice had had an argument and she’d just gone off to stay with some new friend for a bit. Maybe she didn’t like Steve, didn’t like being the gooseberry in that relationship and had moved out without telling anyone. Charlie could be a bit impulsive sometimes. Except she would have told him. They always told each other their troubles, their news, and while she was crap at sending postcards, Charlie would – when she remembered – send him some kind of message via email, even if it was like the one from Vietnam that had just said ‘hi. hanoi.
hot hot hot. c x’.
And it was now ten days since her last contact. There was no way this was good. Something was wrong, something had gone wrong, and Charlie obviously needed help. But what was happening? Sweet FA.
Adam felt tired, but not go-to-bed tired. He was also far too jumpy – like he’d drunk more coffee than was good for him – to attempt vegging out in front of the TV, so he surprised the hell out of Badger by hauling him downstairs and taking him out for a very late walk round the block. It was a clear night, cool but not cold, and Adam wondered what it was like, halfway across the world in Tokyo.
He didn’t actually know exactly how far away Japan was, or what the time difference was, geography not being something he’d ever been interested in. There had to be an atlas somewhere back at the house, and he made a mental note to find it when he got home. Charlie was out there – he had to believe still alive – in a strange foreign city; she was either being Charlie and just forgetting to keep in touch, or in such deep trouble she couldn’t keep in touch.
In front of him, Adam watched Badger doing the dog thing. Not a care in the world, fed, watered and able to take a piss whenever and wherever you chose. Lucky bastard. Badger stopped and looked back at him, tongue out and tail lazily wagging, the expression on his face saying, ‘Yeah, I don’t give too much of a shit about anything, me …’
Reaching up to touch the collage of plasters, swellings and bruises on his face, Adam knew what it felt like to care too much. Although he hadn’t been the one to throw the first punch, he knew he could’ve simply walked away and not got himself all riled and pumped up by that stupid shithead Apperly. The fight had been his fault, he’d made it happen, though there was no way he was ever going to admit that out loud and in public to anyone, even Suzy; and it hadn’t solved anything. Right now, hours afterwards, even the sweet taste of victory – he had, after all, pulverised Steve and Terry – was turning sour.