by Graham Marks
Then Adam remembered the garden centre.
It was fairly near, it was always full of people and there was a back way out. All he had to do was get there. Behind him he could hear the five chasers gaining on him and he risked a glance over his shoulder, which confirmed that the nearest was only about twenty metres away, with the others fanning out on either side in case he made a move left or right. Not looking good.
Skidding round a sharp right-hand bend, grabbing hold of a metal signpost to aid a quicker turn, Adam powered down the slip road leading to the garden centre and pelted through a narrow gap in a thick, shoulder-height hedge between the road and what the company which owned the place liked to call the Nature Zone. Too-lazy-to-mow-zone more like. Ducking down below the hedge, Adam ran in a crouch for about fifty metres, then, as he broke cover and made for the back of the garden centre building, he heard voices – far too close for comfort – shouting, ‘There he is!’
Breathing like a steam train, sweating like he’d just got out of the shower, he zigged through the display of decorative bushes and shrubs (shouldn’t there be a Botanic Liberation Front that stopped people making plants look like dolphins?) and zagged in the ‘OUT’ door by the tills, running past the trolleys loaded with micro-forests of potted vegetation. But where next? It was hard to think straight on the run, but if he remembered the layout of the place correctly he had to get out via the café.
Dodging past clumps of shoppers, keeping as low as he could, Adam ran up the wheelchair-friendly ramp that led to the café and straight through it. As he came out on to the patio area where all the tables were he almost ran back inside – two of the chasers had come round the outside of the building and were closing in on him. But retracing his steps was not going to work. Adam turned and ran between the tables, making for the gateway at the rear of the place and just managing to miss stepping on the tail of a large black dog whose back end was sticking out from underneath a chair.
He was lucky. The two blokes behind him weren’t. As Adam pushed open the gate he heard the crash of a tin tray loaded with tea, coffee and cakes hitting the ground, and all hell breaking loose as the man who’d been carrying it had a go at the boy who’d run into him, grabbing hold of his shirt and shouting that he was going to have to pay for what he’d done. One down. Then the second guy, who didn’t stop to help his friend, also didn’t spot the dog’s tail. He must’ve stamped on it hard because the resulting yelp was loud, angry and agonised, and the dog, still tied to the metal chair, gave snarling chase himself. Chaos.
Adam wished he could’ve stayed and watched, but there was the small matter of the other people still out there after him. He looked around; somewhere the other side of the maze of greenery, beyond the wall of plastic-bagged earth and gravel and eco-friendly compost, was the back entrance, the one where you came in to pick up your Christmas trees. God, he hoped it was open, because if they caught him down there he’d have no chance.
His mouth drier than a slice of stale bread, thinking he’d give anything for a glass of cold water, Adam sprinted through the ranks of palm trees, rows of whatever and displays of flowering plants, so electric-bright they looked suspiciously fake. Coming out into the goods area he swore under what breath he had left as he saw the gates were closed. Closed, yes. Locked, no! He ran over and pushed back the heavy latch, dragging the gate towards him just enough so he could slip through; as he did, coming between the palms and young trees, he saw three figures running towards him.
Adam pulled the gate to – no time to try and find something to jam it shut with – and ran for the main road. If they caught him, getting done over by three people was, he supposed, better than getting done over by five of them. Got to look on the bright side. Traffic was heavy going up the hill, but if he could get across it would slow the others down too. And then he saw a bus coming down the other way … would his luck hold?
Relying on the kindness of your average car driver is no way to cross a busy road, but Adam had run out of choices and just had chances left. Spotting a marginally bigger gap between an approaching red Fiesta and a silver, old-style Micra, he stared at the white-haired lady Micra driver, waving and pointing at the bus, and stepped into the road.
The gamble paid off as the woman, frowning, slowed down just enough to let Adam get to the middle of the road and then dash between another two cars to the other side. He ran the hundred metres down the hill to the bus stop, watching the three pursuers hovering, pissed off, on the opposite side of the road, trapped by the stream of cars. Panting, he put out his hand and waited for the bus to stop; as the doors hissed open he flashed his travel card and went to sit right at the back.
Without bothering to look round, Adam raised his hand and flicked the finger at the rear window to whoever might be watching. So much for a quiet walk to sort stuff out in his head …
10
Joyful impression
After a supper during which no one said much about anything, and, in particular, nothing about Charlie, Adam went to watch some TV. He was a curious mixture of pumped up, knackered from all the running and nervous as hell about what he had to do next.
What he had to do first was just sit tight and wait for his parents to go to bed, which, judging by what they’d been like over the last week, wouldn’t be too long. There was nothing much on any of the channels; films had either started or weren’t anything he wanted to watch, there was no comedy, no crime, no cartoons. Rubbish.
He got up and flicked through the small collection of DVDs they’d got, but, as they’d mostly been acquired by his mum, there was nothing remotely interesting there. Which left the videos. There were five packed shelves of them, going back God knew how many years, and, looking at the dust, most of them hadn’t been out of their cases for ages. It was like being in a cellar looking at a collection of fine wines, as quite a few of the films had been taped off the TV and had handwritten labels on the spine – ah, Wayne’s World, Aug ’99, a very good year for laughs …
It was odd how videos, once the total business, were now kind of antique, like music cassettes. Adam finally picked up Duck Soup, Charlie’s favourite Marx Brothers movie, thinking that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d used his Walkman – probably not since the previous year, when he’d got an mp3 player for a combined birthday/Christmas present.
It took Adam a good twenty minutes hunting to discover the remote tidied away in the cupboard where his mother kept a huge amount of assorted family snapshots, in no particular order, along with the bottles of drink – the orange liqueurs and other odd-coloured, strange-smelling liquids – that no one touched unless everything drinkable had run out. Logical. Where else would you put a remote?
He’d just settled down and was fast-forwarding to the film when his mum popped her head round the door.
‘We’re off to bed … everything all right?’
‘Yeah, Mum, fine.’
‘What are you watching?’
‘Duck Soup,’ Adam replied without thinking, instantly regretting not having hit ‘pause’ and made something up. He watched the tears well up in his mum’s eyes as she stood, watching the title sequence of the movie. He stopped the tape and got up. ‘Don’t, Mum … please don’t … I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have …’
‘It’s not your fault. I can’t help it, Adam … I think about her every waking minute and when I’m asleep I dream about her, too. I think I’m going mad, not knowing what’s happened. And then … and then there’s your gran …’
Adam, taller than his mum by a couple of inches, put his arms round her and felt her sag against him, sobbing quietly. He felt so bad that this was what all the doing nothing and the waiting were putting her through; he felt like the parent, holding his mum, patting her back and telling her it was going to be OK. But this wasn’t about falling over and hurting yourself or some small pet going belly up. He knew it would only be OK if someone did something.
‘Try not to worry, Mum …’
She looked up a
t Adam. ‘Charlie loved that film.’
‘Don’t talk like that, she’s just missing, like the stupid video remote was missing until I spent some time looking for it … she’ll be found, Mum, she will.’ Adam watched his mum try and smile, leant down slightly so she could kiss him goodnight and watched her go out of the room. He wondered how parents felt when they lied to their children – it’s OK, darling, little Hammy Hamster has gone to rodent heaven … you fell over? Let me kiss it and make it better … let’s roll up your sleeve; no, the doctor’s not going to hurt you …
So much bullshit.
The film had finished half an hour ago, but Adam was still watching TV. Giving his eyes something to do while he thought this whole thing through one more time. Or two or three more times, however many it needed until he was satisfied the risks were worth taking.
One floor up, in the room his dad used as a study, there was a freestanding drawer unit. Third drawer down, under some papers, there should be an envelope, a white one with one of those cellophane windows. In the envelope was an unsigned Visa card, valid for another four years, with the name A. T. Grey stamped into it. His dad was Anthony Thomas, he was Adam Thomas. Same middle name. Some family tradition, same initials. He knew he shouldn’t have poked around in his father’s private things, but he’d been looking for a stapler or hole-punch one afternoon when there was no one else in the house and one thing had led to another.
With the Visa card he could go online and buy a ticket. He’d got a valid passport, he’d got a couple of hundred pounds in a savings account that he could use for expenses – his contribution to this mission – and he’d leave a note for his parents, saying he needed some space and had gone away with Suzy for a few days. No details, no explanation. Much the best way to do it.
Adam still didn’t move from the sofa. His parents must’ve been asleep for well over an hour, and now was the time to set the plan in motion. He chewed his lip, watching an old Cure video, ‘Love Cats’, on VH1. Taking the card wasn’t a problem, he could always put it back, but using it was where he would step right over the line. It was the memory of his mum’s face, of holding her as she cried for Charlie, that did it. He jabbed the off button on the cable remote and stood up.
The house was quiet, which meant every move seemed to make a disproportionately loud noise – stairs creaked, door hinges complained, drawers squealed like a pin had been stuck in them. But he finally had the card in his hand. Sitting in the dark study on his father’s slightly threadbare office chair, Adam turned the card towards the window and looked at it in the streetlight. He was just about to get up when he thought he heard a noise outside on the stairs.
Shit. Was someone up? Could one of his parents be going to the bathroom, or downstairs to get a glass of water, or whatever it was the way-over-40s did in the middle of the night? Luckily he hadn’t turned the light on or he’d be in deep shit.
Eyes fixed on the door, Adam was considering ducking under the desk when he saw a black shadow appear on the landing outside. Badger. ‘Bastard …’ he whispered, finally breathing out. Badger took this to be a perfectly normal greeting and came into the room, tail wagging like he hadn’t seen Adam for days.
The dog trotted over and put his cold, wet nose under Adam’s left hand, expertly moving it into position so that he kind of had to tickle his ear. Absentmindedly Adam did what was expected of him as he scanned the desk and the drawer cabinet to make sure he’d left everything as it should be. Not that he imagined his father was going to come in and, James Bond-style, check that foreign agents hadn’t been at work overnight, but there was no sense in being sloppy.
He and Badger left the study and the two of them went up to his room. Partners in crime.
Adam spent the next hour checking the Net for the best flight deals to Tokyo. He wanted to go as soon as possible, and that meant there were no advanced booking deals to be had. Whatever. He’d have to pay – his dad would have to pay – what it cost. Was £400 a lot to try and find out what had happened to Charlie? He’d no doubt find out when his dad got the bill.
The best flight he could get seemed to be Virgin, leaving Heathrow at 1 p.m. on Tuesday and arriving in Tokyo twelve hours later at 9 a.m. the next morning. The same flight was available tomorrow, but that would mean getting the tube out to Heathrow by around 9:30 a.m., and give him no time to do anything. Adam selected the Tuesday flight. What about coming back? He got up and went to look at the calendar up on his wall to count out the days; noticing that Badger had obviously got bored and gone off somewhere else, he pushed his bedroom door to.
Counting off the days, Adam figured that he couldn’t stay any longer than ten. That would get him back the weekend before his suspension ended, and if he hadn’t come up with something after ten days, more time was not going to help. And whatever happened, good or bad, he could always change his flight and come home sooner. He went back and sat at his desk, entering the details for his return flight, then all the payment information.
Buying the ticket shouldn’t set off any alarm bells, but would the use of the Visa make anyone sit up and take notice, or would the transaction simply go through? Only one way to find out. As he clicked the mouse on ‘Buy’ he heard the door being pushed open. He assumed it was Badger coming back in again, so the voice shocked him rigid.
‘You’re up late. Everything OK?’
Adam looked up to see his father standing half in and half out of his room, looking bleary-eyed and smiling at him in a puzzled, slightly confused way, obviously not quite awake. The spell that had glued Adam’s tongue to the roof of his mouth finally wore off.
‘Yeah … yeah, everything’s, you know, fine, Dad …’
The room was laid out so that, from where his father was standing, he couldn’t see the computer screen, or the credit card lying on the desk in front of the keyboard. Adam had set things up that way on purpose, because there were times you definitely didn’t want someone to walk in and see what you were doing.
His dad came into the room. ‘Are you emailing?’
Adam surreptitiously pushed the card under his keyboard with his left hand while he quickly used the mouse to open Outlook over the top of the travel website page.
‘I, um, I couldn’t sleep … I was writing something to Charlie …’ An easy lie, because it had truth at its core. ‘I do it quite a lot.’
His dad sat down on the corner of Adam’s unmade bed, yawning. ‘I, uh …’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose I wanted to say, y’know, sorry if I’ve been an arsehole lately …’
‘No, Dad, you haven’t …’
‘Yeah, I have, but I feel like I’m trapped. I shouldn’t be here, I should be in Tokyo looking for Charlie, but I can’t leave your mum, not with Grangie like she is and Granpa Eddy coping so badly.’
‘Is Grangie, like, really bad?’
‘Pretty much … the doctors say that she should go into a hospice, give Eddy some rest.’
‘A hospice? Why?’
‘Everything’s shutting down, Adam. It’s only a matter of time. She should be somewhere where they can make her as comfortable as possible.’
Adam felt his stomach knot and his throat tighten, the silence surrounding him and his father becoming almost a physical thing. He couldn’t think, didn’t know what to say or do, knowing only that he really didn’t want to deal with all this shit at the same time.
His father took a deep breath and stood up. ‘Hopefully we’ll know something very soon, though … about Charlie. I had a call from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on Friday.’
‘You didn’t tell me – what did they say?’
‘Nothing much, they just wanted to assure us that everything that can be done to find Charlie is being done …’ A pained expression spread over his dad’s face, making him look old and sad and angry. ‘Usual Whitehall bollocks. I am going to go …’
His father yawned again and for a moment Adam thought he was about to say he wa
s going to Tokyo.
‘… I’m going to see them tomorrow, get them to tell me what’s really going on.’ He looked at his watch, which wasn’t there, and then he glanced over at Adam’s wrist. ‘I’m off. See you in the morning.’
‘OK …’ Adam wanted to call him back and tell him he understood why he hadn’t already gone to Tokyo, why he had to stay and wait to hear what other people were doing instead of doing something himself. But he didn’t. He watched his father walk away. ‘… see you tomorrow, Dad.’
11
We produce it for whole human beings
As soon as he woke up, Adam texted Suzy and arranged to meet her later that afternoon. He had to tell her what he was doing – and hope she wouldn’t mind that he’d sort of made her a part of his plan. He’d assumed there wouldn’t be a problem, because she wouldn’t actually have to do anything, but you had to ask. Having successfully kept Suzy a complete mystery to his parents – they didn’t even know her first name, let alone any other details – there was a good possibility she wouldn’t be involved at all.
Adam also realised that, since changing schools at the end of Year 7, he’d also changed almost all his friends, and while his parents knew his present social circle reasonably well, they didn’t socialise with his friends’ parents, not like they’d used to when he was at junior school. If, for whatever reason, they tried to find out where he had gone with this nameless girlfriend of his, there was no way they’d be able to just pick up the phone and do it.
Before he met up with Suzy he had a lot of stuff to get done. A lot of stress to deal with. Starting with actually finding where he’d put his passport. It was nowhere to be found. Abso-lute-ly-no-where. Adam turned his room upside down, tidied everything back up, kind of, and then looked everywhere again. Twice. Nothing. He thought hard, trying to remember the last time he’d used it. It was the long weekend trip he and a couple of mates had taken to Amsterdam during the previous autumn break. And then he remembered. It would be where his mum always kept the family’s passports, ever since he was a kid. In her bedside cabinet. She must’ve found it when she emptied his bag and did his washing.