‘What are you guys doing out here?’ Jarwar says. Her cold stare looking back at us in the pounding rain.
Bartu breathes sighs of relief but I don’t quite feel the same. I scan behind us to see what must be her car, parked up with the driver’s door open, rogue splashes leaping inside. It was her car we saw earlier. I’m almost certain she’s been following us, but I keep this to myself for now.
‘Ah, hi. We… had reports of some kids hanging around this place. Some undesirables. Graffiti or whatever. Ripping a swing off its hinges. All that,’ I say, my voice struggling to stay steady, post the shock, in the freezing rain.
‘You’re due back,’ she says.
‘Yeah. I know,’ I say.
Patter patter. Pitter patter.
‘You remember me, right?’ she says.
‘Of course,’ I say.
‘You see me. Right?’ she says.
‘Of course,’ I say. The odd question lingers.
Still Bartu says nothing. And neither does anyone else for a few seconds.
‘It doesn’t belong to any of the girls, by the way,’ she says.
‘Sorry? What?’ I say, looking her up and down.
‘The leg. It belonged to a woman at least five years older,’ she says.
Her voice dying away under the sound of the rain.
‘So don’t say I don’t keep you in the loop,’ she says.
‘Thanks. We’re coming now,’ I shout through the squall.
And still Bartu says nothing.
‘Great. Can I give you a lift?’
Pitter. Patter. We stand stock still.
‘We’re in Bartu’s car. It would’ve taken us a while otherwise. What with me holding him up and all.’
‘Right.’
She still doesn’t move.
‘Why don’t we catch you back at the ranch? You knocking off now?’ I say, my voice straining with phoney pleasantries.
‘Sure,’ she says. ‘Sounds good, I’ll follow.’
The noise of compliance carries away on the wind as she turns, resolutely. When her chokehold gaze relinquishes, I look to Bartu and get nothing from him either but the signal to move towards his car, which we do, as my hand touches the crackling rust on the green wrought iron gates of our last exhausted playground.
And our feet slap the mud and grass on the other side. And I wonder where else I’ve seen her car. And who exactly that leg belongs to. As the rain comes down so hard against the dark.
22
‘Dee. Dah dah dah dee dah, dah dah, dee head…’
‘You remember me, right? You see me. Right?’
That’s what she said. And it’s funny she said that.
When we got back it was all good feelings and checking in. They shot the breeze about anything but what everyone was thinking about. The girls. I thought about bringing them up myself but I didn’t feel so much like talking.
The silver car. Not just any car. A police car. As clear as daylight to most people. Unmistakeable. What’s the use of noticing the strange things, if I can’t spot the obvious ones? I start to think that if I can stare that in the face and not recognise it, then what else have I missed?
Maybe I’m not ready for this. This is a borough of riots, of bloody chases and innocent kids taken. Second thoughts, maybe I’ll never be ready for this.
‘You guys need a lift?’ she says outside, in our civvies.
The tone implicitly changes again out of uniform. We’re just people, off the clock. Three people doing a day job that don’t know each other so well.
‘I’ve got the car,’ Bartu says.
‘I’m going to walk,’ I say.
‘You sure?’ he says. ‘I can drop you back.’
‘I need the exercise.’
They turn towards the weather. There is an unsaid question about ‘letting’ me do that, but I’m not staying around for that.
‘Yeah, I’ll get off. See you for another round tomorrow,’ I say, as I turn. Before spinning around again as a sudden question occurs. ‘Hey, Jarwar, you ever seen a light blue circle with two diagonal lines through it? Just a little marking, in paint, outside a house?’
She’s still. Giving the impression of sustained and deep thought.
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘They’re for utility companies. So the water guys can signal to the electricity guys where pipes are and that.’
My neck quakes under the rain. ‘Ever heard them used for… anything else?’
‘What else?’ she says, meeting my blank face. ‘They’re so companies can communicate, not step on toes, help each other out. Why you ask?’
I shrug. ‘I love to learn, Jarwar. Guess I’m just a curious guy.’
They shout as I make off as fast as I can, resolute against the elements.
‘Hey, remember tomorrow is Friday, yeah?’ she says.
‘That Friday feeling, Tom. Nice long day off after that to forget all your troubles,’ he shouts.
Without turning around, I put a thumb in the air above my head as I walk. I don’t know what he’s talking about. He of all people should know it doesn’t stop for me. He could be playing along for her benefit, but there’s something different about him whenever anyone else is around.
As I go, I hold up my phone and pretend to check it but actually I’m watching them in the dark reflection of my screen. Their bodies change. They seem to know each other better than I thought they did. They’re deep in conversation. I see it all as I walk away, and then I see it disappear into the distance.
I put my hood up to shield me from the falling rain, the outside world and everything else. The image of that leg burnt into my mind.
‘You remember me, right? You see me. Right?’ That’s what she said. And it’s funny, you see, that she said that. Because if she was talking about my prosopagnosia, I’ve only told Bartu about that.
I wonder what else has been going from my mouth to her ears. And anyone else’s, for that matter. This might be the paraneea talking of course. But I do start to wonder.
*
The next day I’m frustrated to find that Levine has charged us with another gift we certainly can’t return. You can elaborate and exaggerate things from your shift when you’ve done very little, but there’s no lying when it comes to things you have to do.
However, I was just considering that perhaps it’d be good to have some time away from thoughts of the girls, to let my mind decompress, when I felt a hand on my back.
‘Oi! What you two doing around my neck again?’
It was Turan, and maybe he was joking, maybe he wasn’t. He seemed to be protective of his little fiefdom.
‘Kids smashed up a shop this time. Pissed in the till. All sorts. Another blessing from Levine,’ Bartu said.
‘Fuckers. Told you. As you were,’ Turan says, and he would’ve ended the conversation right there if I hadn’t had other ideas.
‘Hey, Turan. Who’s that guy, err…’ I say, clicking my fingers, ‘…came into the chicken shop? We see him about a lot.’
‘With that conclusive description? No idea, mate,’ he says. He does have a lot of faces in his life, I guess.
‘Yeah, but… skinny guy? In sunglasses? Maybe I’ll ask a –’
‘Oh yeah, I know the one. Poor bastard. His dad went down for fiddling with him. Jarwar put the fucker away. He had to tell her some gruesome shit,’ he says with some steel. ‘Few years ago, I think she said. Can’t remember his name. Why d’you ask?’
‘Absolutely no reason,’ I say.
‘All right then. Best of British,’ he shouts, as he crosses the road. ‘You get home all right last night, Tom?’
While I’m slightly surprised and maybe even flattered to hear him use my name with a warm inflection, that’s more than balanced out by the negative of how aware everyone seems to be of my movements. I shut this down, though. Keep some authority in my stoicism and save some suspicion for later.
‘It’s only rain,’ I say.
Turan merely nods and
waves from over the road, unsure how amusing to find this plain speaking. Then he heads down a side road as we make towards the latest landmark that’s taken a beating from the local residents.
I want to ask Bartu how Turan had been told about the less-than-scintillating story of me walking home in the rain. But instead I focus on thinking about why I can’t exactly see anyone charging around pouring all their effort into bringing these girls home.
‘Is this it down here?’ I say.
‘Yeah, this is it here,’ he says, our tired mouths chuntering out adequate conversation.
We find the place has been more ravaged and fucked up than anything I’ve seen before. After struggling with the till, they decided to repurpose it as a Portaloo, then set about smashing out all the lights, with a baseball bat, presumably. What seems to place an age on the culprits is the amount of gelatine-based sweets and crisps that have been taken, and the feeling that anyone over the age of sixteen who might have done this seriously needs some better friends.
What’s more worrying is that at the back of the store, near the toilet rolls and cardboard boxes, is a bullet hole.
Need for stimulation, impulsivity, poor behaviour controls. Vandals have similar profiles to shoplifters. And psychopaths. Strange how one thing can bleed into the other, once you’ve crossed that line. Criminal versatility, that’s another thing that scores highly on the psychopath checklist. Not that I’m calling these kids psychopaths. Or anyone else for that matter. Not yet.
‘Emre, you wanna come and take a look at this?’
‘Jesus. They’re not just angry,’ he says.
‘They’re armed,’ I say.
A chill has followed us into the store. Organised crime is one thing. The kind Turan seems to be trying to solve at basement level. The drugs trade, at its leaden heart, is still just an industry. There are paper trails to hang on to and bad reviews from unhappy customers. But this seems like mindless crime and I don’t know how you reason with that. Turan was right, they are a different breed.
Then a sensation comes over me that I haven’t felt for a while, and I think Emre Bartu feels it, too. The unwanted creep of apathy, brought on by the meaninglessness of the crime and how small I feel under its suffocating weight.
We are Sisyphus. And that boulder only gets heavier.
When we review the tapes with the red-eyed shopkeeper, my spirits fall further. In the blaze of bats and glass fractures, a young boy with a distinctive scarlet birthmark rears his head. The sort of face that even I can place, so clear are its markings, no cheat sheet needed.
I think you could definitely call this a violation of the terms of his ASBO. I picture his scared look as he peered around a corner in his brother’s house, before I decided to shop him.
As the security video is rewound and replayed, and I see Eli’s body hungrily lay into the corner store again, I wonder if all I’ve ever done since the beginning is make things worse. If kids can ever be straightened out by intervention. If whoever has taken these girls will ever be found, unless they want to be.
I feel relieved it will be someone else that picks him up. Not that I’m scared of the kid or anything. But he already thinks I’m victimising him. And I’ve got enough trouble following me around as it is.
The dead eye of the security tape runs on, as my insides turn. And I feel a sense of overwhelming futility, and melancholy for the future. Like there’s a hole in my chest, as well as in my head.
Documented Memory Project #2: Tape
Still reeling from what I’ve just seen, on the tape I found at the Da Silva house, I push my camcorder to the back of my wardrobe where it’s lived for many years alone.
As it makes its way past miscellaneous boxes of school ephemera, my hand brushes against the smoothed down end of another tape I’d forgotten existed. I hold it up and force my memory to surrender the details; the plain white sticker on its face remains blank and stiff-lipped. I shake the tape as if this will better confirm its reality.
When I slot it into the camera deck and the image fuzzes into being, I recall smuggling my new toy into school. I was the January kid with the covetable gift to show off that he really should have left at home. The shot glides past the oak trees of the school field. The auteur adopting the style of a hidden camera exposé, zooming in on various faces. Only tracings to me. Plump freckly wads, like pug dogs, melded into one single zip file in my mind entitled ‘what children look like’.
The shaky cam starts to make the viewer feel seasick, as it struggles to focus, particularly in zoom. Mercifully, the director pulls back, a moment of wonder happening as we are greeted with nothing but autumn term leaves being blown from heaps at the edge of screen, which the camera with cinematic instinct follows, soon hitting an open mouthed face that dominates the screen. The architecture of which I feel like I almost recognise. I tingle from my shoulders, to my spine, all the way up the vines of nerves to my brain stem.
‘What are you doing?’ she says.
‘Filming a documentary,’ says the film-maker. It’s disturbing to hear your voice as a child, a different voice box in your throat. My London accent, far spikier then, must’ve become dulled by university and adult-hood’s journey towards neutrality. I was a different collection of cells then. Strange how we change, someone pulling the sheet out from inside you, as you hardly notice nature’s ultimate magic trick.
‘Do you want to film me?’ she says, stepping back to centre herself in the frame. Her face. Those eyes. I feel something.
She does some handstands that aren’t befitting for her age. This girl, I remember, she remained childish, babyish, the word we used, until quite late I think. She rushes the camera and soon it’s swivelling around. We glimpse the milky white sky and worms in the dirt, before it settles on the close up of her bloody knee.
The cameraman has little choice, confronted with the sight, it’s pink wrinkles stained in excessive levels of black blood. She pushes into the abrasion for the viewer’s sake. Children love picking at scabs. They can’t help themselves. Her fingernails burrow into the wound as fresh blood bubbles up like lava to the summit, this display finally causing audible sounds of distaste from young Tom.
‘Eugh,’ he says. Which peculiarly makes her stop. As if she was unaware that her actions would be anything but adorable. She turns around and lifts her skirt up to flash the viewer and then spins back to judge the effect. But young Tom has already averted the camera’s eye, to a tree, almost avoiding the sight of her white knickers altogether.
When he pans back she has closed down the distance.
‘I want it,’ she says. I feel like I can touch her. Smell her.
And soon he has given her the camera and they are lower, partially hidden, the oak tree dirty in the blurred foreground. The camera zooms in on younger girls, cross-legged and playing pat-a-cake some distance away. Her Attenborough-like voiceover draws a laugh from old and young Tom alike. Could this be Sarah? I can’t tell.
‘And now. In their… natural habitat. We find here… A rare sighting… Of these horrific creatures. In their checked summer dresses their mummies make. These… little squirts. These bitch geeks.’
The camera swivels onto young Tom’s face. He’s no more familiar to me in close up than any of the other malnourished children.
‘And now an even more hideous beast.’ At which Tom frowns his disapproval, causing her to laugh wildly, the camera spinning around to catch her falling out of shot. Then she reappears, newly angelic. The mood changing as the viewers, Tom then and now, say nothing.
She’s colouring herself in. In my mind. But I can’t quite connect the dots. I start to remember things about this girl, but is she Sarah? Perhaps the shot is too close and blurred even for someone more blessed in the area of facial recogntion than I. I don’t know.
As the shot holds, to the soundtrack of the wind in the trees, I look into her green eyes. And think about the other tape, the one I found at the Da Silva house. The one I watched before this, c
ontaining the shadow of a woman in the background, who swiftly disappeared from shot.
The image of this little blonde girl on screen now will soon be erased from my memory, too. Unless I can hold on to her. Track her down. There’s something about her. A feeling I can’t put my finger on. The fractured pieces are slowly forming a whole person. What I remember about the girl in the video is this: she will move to Battersea and out of the boy’s life in a few short weeks. I feel like I have stumbled on a minor miracle. We didn’t have many of these encounters, she and I. She was, more often, a distant shining figure. I watch the wind blow her blonde hair, so softly, as the brown leaves shoot away, in the distance.
23
‘It’s just you and me baby, on the edge of the park,
Can’t see anyone else lady, in the pool, in the dark.’
‘I’m going to be alone tomorrow,’ I say, as we drag our bones back to the station to deliver the security tapes. It falls from my mouth without me thinking about it. One second it’s rolling around in there, the next it’s on the pavement.
‘Well, I’ll see you Sunday,’ says Bartu, clearly not picking up on my physical, emotional and verbal cues.
It’s been a long week. I know I have to go home and think, talk it through with Mark and review our dead ends. Ponder what our next move might be by looking at the strands from further back. But the long stretch of the weekend lays out before me like a spectre, casting a shadow over my brain and every single thought.
I’m afraid of the passages of unchartered nothing. I’m afraid of black holes in my diary. It’s a modern complaint, but I’m sure you understand.
‘Hey Emre, what you eating for lunch tomorrow?’ I say.
‘Well, we’re staying in. Aisha is cooking.’
‘That sounds good. I could do that,’ I say.
He stares at me, the guy with the limp and nobody to go home to but a judgmental cat. But still somehow he hesitates.
‘It’s kind of particular cooking. You know, she’s trying this Turkish dish… ’
‘That sounds perfect. Thanks.’
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