by Adam Baron
Luke and Sharon soon started seeing each other seriously and his view of her never tempered. He agreed with almost everything she said, and I could see him trying to change to match up to her. This surprised me because Luke had always been flighty and noncommittal about most things, especially women. But even though Sharon was two or three years younger than Luke, she seemed to mature him. He took himself much more seriously. He worked a lot harder at his acting, going to evening classes at the Actor’s Centre, sending out CVs all the time, and I have to admit things did start to go well for him. He got a good role at the Kings Head, and then a couple of bit-parts in the West End, and some TV. Luke had always written poetry, which he never showed anyone, not even me, and Sharon persuaded him not only to show it to her, but to work on it and send it off to magazines. He did, and after a while his stuff began to appear in the Rialto, Stand Magazine, and once Poetry Review. In general Luke began to approach things the same way that Sharon did, with a determined, though quiet confidence which was impressive but, I thought, somewhat forced and even unnatural. He became a graver, more weighty person and I wasn’t sure I really knew him any more.
When Luke and Sharon told me that they were getting married I remember having mixed feelings. Luke was twenty-six, Sharon twenty-three, and I thought they were too young. I thought that Luke was perhaps growing old too soon, that he had completely shunted aside the child in him in an effort to keep up with Sharon. Sharon seemed to monopolize my brother and the times when they were in company she could never quite relax, giving the impression of marking time until she could get him alone again. I knew, however, that this was probably jealousy. I missed Luke’s infantile sense of humour, and realized that it was Sharon’s distrust of any sort of frivolity which bugged me. I had begun to miss my brother (and the aspiring actresses he used to introduce me to). I was pissed off that Luke never seemed up for a big night any more, or that he suddenly started getting a ridiculously sour expression on his face when I cut up a line on the coffee table. Fuck it – I was the Fuzz, for God’s sake! I thought he was taking things too seriously, something which, ever since Luke could talk, he was constantly accusing me of.
I didn’t think that Luke should marry Sharon, not yet at least, but my reservations would have only caused a rift between us so I put them aside. I kissed them both and told them they were stupid and that I would happily be best man at the divorce as well. Sharon kissed me back and told me, with that unnerving certainty of hers, that it wouldn’t come to that. And she was right. It didn’t come to a wedding either.
* * *
After we had finished the sausages, Sharon asked me what I was working on at the moment. I told her about the usual runaways, and then I told her about the MP. I told her what the MP had told me. He wouldn’t have liked it but he didn’t know Sharon. She wouldn’t tell anybody.
‘Peter Morgan is gay?’ she asked, surprised.
‘Sir Peter Morgan.’
‘He doesn’t look it,’ she said. ‘Does he?’
‘I don’t know,’ I answered. ‘I have no way of telling. Unless it’s obvious of course.’
‘Like when someone is all in leather, with a Freddie Mercury moustache?’
‘I suppose,’ I said. ‘But it doesn’t have to be that obvious. I know it’s a cliché, but some people just look gay.’
‘Maybe that’s because they choose to look gay,’ Sharon said, ‘in whatever they’re wearing. If they chose not to then you would never be able to guess, not even if they were in the leather. Peter Morgan chooses not to. It’s still surprising though. I wonder how he voted on the age of consent debate?’
‘Probably against, especially as he’s keen that none of his political colleagues know about his orientation.’
‘Damn hypocrite.’
‘I know. But in a strange way I actually feel sorry for him.’
Sharon put down her wineglass.
‘For being gay? And being a Tory at the same time!’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Because he’s realized that the way he’s been living his life is wrong. All the intrigues and lies, the pretence, it all seems pointless to him after what has happened to his brother. But he’s too far immersed in it to break out.’
‘To return is as tedious as to go over?’
‘Something like that. He knows that it doesn’t matter, not really, if people know he’s gay. He knows that it would probably make him happier if they did know. But he won’t ever let it out. His wife, his position. He’s stuck.’
Sharon sat back in her chair. ‘It sounds like you quite liked him,’ she said, with more than a hint of disapproval.
‘I did,’ I admitted, ‘after a while. After he told me he was gay. It took courage to do that to a complete stranger. I could tell that he cares, or cared, about his brother.’
‘So does Michael Howard I should think,’ Sharon said. ‘If he’s got one.’
‘Then maybe I’d like him too,’ I said. I shrugged my shoulders. ‘I don’t know, there was just something about Morgan that I liked. Something intangible. He has a kind of wistful, removed quality about him.’
Sharon laughed. ‘He doesn’t on Question Time.’
‘No,’ I answered, thinking about it. ‘You’re right. He definitely doesn’t look wistful on Question Time!’
I served the tiramisu, and after we’d devoured it with the animalistic relish which it deserved, Sharon told me what she had been doing recently. Sharon finished her pupillage two years ago, and works as a barrister for the Refugee Legal Centre, defending asylum seekers against deportation orders. It’s a difficult, dispiriting job, given the current attitude towards refugees, or burdens on the state as they are portrayed. Sharon’s success rate is a little higher than the average at about six per cent. She spends a lot of time in miserable detention centres, talking to people who are scared and desperate. They tell her about Nigerian prisons, Turkish punishment squads, and they show her bruises and scars from cigarette burns or knife cuts, which Sharon can never prove they did not inflict upon themselves. She watches their faces when she fails to win their last appeal, and then she imagines their faces when they are sent back to their country of origin, and she never hears from them again.
Sometimes though, there are lighter moments, and Sharon is the first to admit that some people do try it on. I sat listening to her tell me about a woman whose boyfriend was applying for asylum on some invented grounds of abuse, and who wrote to his girlfriend in Albania telling her exactly what to say at the airport when she came to England to join him. Customs officials found the letter in her bag, which not only blew her claim but her boyfriend’s as well. I watched Sharon as she told the story. Her lipstick had dissolved into thin lines, which exaggerated the fullness of her mouth. She systematically pushed an errant strand of her dark blond hair back behind her left ear, as it kept repeating its offence of escape. Her teeth were stained by the wine, her eyes so clear and green you could see why unimaginative people often asked her if she wore those coloured contact lenses. I thought about Luke, and remembered the time he told me about them. How he had described those eyes just like they were, and I didn’t believe him, thinking he was just a love-sick fool.
I laughed at Sharon’s story, and apropos of nothing I suddenly told her that I was glad she had been able to come, and that it always meant a lot to me to see her. She smiled, and we looked at each other for a second. Neither of us said anything. Neither of us were self-conscious, we just sat there looking and smiling at each other. I don’t know why. Then her smile took on the faintest, most distant tinge of sadness, like caramel which has just begun to burn. I looked down at the table, at a small stain of red from a drop of wine which had missed the glass. I saw Sharon’s hand, resting on the table a few inches from mine. Her engagement ring. I didn’t know she still wore it. I looked at the simple ring, one small diamond set into the gold band, for several seconds. I had lent Luke the money to buy it. He still owed me seven hundred quid, the bastard. I put both my hands on the t
able, pushed myself up without looking at Sharon, and went to make coffee.
In fact, I had no coffee. I had stood talking to the youngest Molise boy in the deli for a full ten minutes while I tried to remember the thing which I knew I had to get. But it never came to me. I apologized to Sharon, a little too much. She said she didn’t mind though. She looked a little nervous, but then she smiled at me again, softly. I looked away from her. All of a sudden I didn’t want to be in my warm, cosy flat with Sharon. I was beginning to feel claustrophobic and heavy.
I clapped my hands together, trying to make the atmosphere disappear like a magician with a fake bunch of flowers. I had an idea.
‘Do you want to see the famous William H. Rucker, Private Eye, scourge of the evil and corrupt, in action?’ I asked her.
‘You bet,’ she answered with surprise, picking up quickly on my lightening of the mood.
‘Are we going to catch a killer?’ she asked.
‘Nothing so exciting,’ I told her.
* * *
The drive down to King’s Cross only took five minutes. I parked the Mazda and then took Sharon, and my second-hand Nikon, into the twenty-four-hour-cafe at the bottom of the Pentonville Road. As usual, the cafe looked shabby and the tables were all dirty. The waitress came over but she didn’t bother to wipe up from the people before us. We ordered cafés au lait. I took the camera out of my bag and rested it on the seat beside me. Remembering a very embarrassing time earlier in my career, I made sure that the film was in it. I smiled at Sharon and kept one eye on a group of teenage lads who were standing around on the corner of the Pentonville Road and Calshot Street.
‘You take me to the loveliest places, Bill Rucker,’ Sharon said, using her serviette to create a stain-free square of Formica for herself.
I was looking for Dominic Lewes, whom I had found once before. His mother didn’t want me to tell her where he was, which I would not have done anyway, she just wanted to know that he was alive, and what sort of state he was in. I didn’t really expect to find him. It had been eight months since I had discovered him in this very spot, and I’d learnt over the past ten years that absolutely anything can happen in eight months to a young boy from Grimsby who’s run away from home. Cold, hunger, death to name but the obvious and there are plenty of things which occur that are far from predictable even to someone who has seen a lot of it before. It would send you mad to think of all the things that can happen, that are happening right this second, to all of those young Odysseuses who have broken free from the ties that bound them and come to the damp rooms and stinking alleys that make up their London. Any number of things could have been done to Dominic in any number of places but still, it didn’t hurt looking in the place I had found him before. We had wanted coffee anyway.
The coffees arrived, and Sharon and I sipped them, chatting, while I kept an eye out on the street.
‘One thing though, Billy,’ Sharon said, resting her elbows on the table and leaning forward. ‘You never tell the parents where their kids are. I still don’t really understand.’
‘It’s simple,’ I told her. ‘Kids run away for a reason. The kids who are happy don’t run away. The kids who are quite miserable don’t run away. It’s the kids who are very miserable that run away. They wouldn’t view what they had to go through here as acceptable unless the alternative was worse. When I first started I found this girl, twelve or thirteen, and took the dad down to this squat in Streatham where she was living. I thought I had just reunited a misunderstood teenager with her worried and non-recriminating family, and saved her from all sorts of bad shit. But you should have seen the poor kid’s face when her loving dad showed up. The sheer terror. I thought she was going to vomit. And the dad’s face. There was no relief, no joy. His face just sort of set when he saw her, hard as granite, and I knew immediately what I had sent the girl back to. He didn’t say anything, he just pulled her into his car. Of course, not all the parents would be like this, but how can I know? I never tell them. Sometimes I tell the Bill, who tell social services, if the kid is very young and into some bad shit. But I’m not sending some poor kid back to a dad who thinks he’s Nigel Benn, or an uncle who can’t keep his cock in his drawers.’
I took a sip of coffee. It was surprisingly good. Outside, a car drew up and one of the lads on the corner pushed himself off the wall and walked over to it. He leant into the passenger side window for a second or two and then got in. The car drove away.
’But,’ Sharon continued, ‘and I don’t mean to be rude about your abilities as an investigator, Mr Rucker, but if you won’t tell the parents where their kid is, then why do they hire you? Most other agencies don’t have your scruples, I shouldn’t think.’
‘They don’t hire me at first,’ I said. ‘I usually get used when some agency or other, made up of overweight failed ex-cops pushing sixty, fails to find the kid, or when they’ve run away so many times that the parents know there’s no point bringing them back again. It’s the mothers usually, who hire me. Often I’m told only to contact them, that the father doesn’t know about me. Some of the mothers, I swear, are glad that their son or daughter has escaped what they haven’t been able to. They don’t want them to go back, they just want to know that they are OK.’
‘I see,’ Sharon said, putting her long glass down on the saucer. ‘I bet you still lose money though, doing it the way you do.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I probably do.’
At that moment, a boy in white jeans and a black MA1 walked around the corner and started talking to the other lads. The boy had short, bleached blond hair, but I was pretty certain it was Dominic. I pushed aside my coffee.
’Bingo,’ I said.
I reached for my bag and pulled out a copy of the photo I’d taken of him last time. I looked at it, then at the boy on the street and yes, in spite of the hair, which had been long and dark, it was him. I grabbed hold of the Nikon.
’Wow,’ Sharon whispered, ‘action!’
I focused in on Dominic Lewes, but he was in shadow. Even with the lens I had I knew I could only get him if he stepped out into the light of the lamppost. I wasn’t worried about it. By the look of him, the way the other lads treated him, I could tell that he came here often. If I couldn’t get him tonight I could easily come back. I was amazed once again how easy my job sometimes was. I put the camera down on the chair beside me, and smiled broadly at an old lady who was looking very nervously at my distinctly suspicious behaviour. She turned away.
I kept an eye on the street, and we sat drinking coffee until Sharon said that she had to leave. She had a case to prepare for the morning. I put three pound coins on the table before she could do anything herself, and then gave her a look which told her that I didn’t want a fight about it. As we were standing up she suddenly thought of something and delved into the postman’s bag she always carries. She pulled out a slim blue A4 file.
‘I don’t know if you’ve seen all these,’ she said, holding the file out to me. ‘I went through Luke’s books again a couple of weeks ago and collected together most of his poems. I also found some that he’d hidden in his acting notes.’
I took the file and looked at the sky-blue card. I didn’t open it.
‘Thanks,’ I said, after a second or two. I felt that I should say something more but I didn’t know what. I held the file gingerly for a second and then I opened my bag and put the file inside, careful not to bend it. Luke’s poems, his private thoughts about Sharon, about me. About our father. I put the Nikon in next to them. I picked up the bag and walked over to the door with Sharon.
‘Aren’t you going to wait and take his picture?’ Sharon asked, surprised that I was leaving, nodding over towards the corner where Dominic Lewes stood with his colleagues.
‘It’s too dark,’ I said, ‘but I know where he is. And it gives me yet another excuse to visit this delightful establishment.’ I waved goodbye to the waitress, and pointed to our table to indicate that we weren’t doing a runner. Sharon opened the
door for me and we walked out into the sharp October air, redolent with eau-de-kebab and carbon monoxide.
I offered Sharon a lift home but she refused and hailed a cab before I could begin to persuade her. I opened the door for her, kissed her goodbye, and then closed it after she had climbed inside, in the ungraceful fashion only a London cab can enforce on you. Sharon slid the window down and thanked me for the evening. She said it was good to go out and just be together without mulling over the past like we were prone to doing. I said yes, it was. I wanted to fix up a day when we could both go and see Luke together, but just as I started speaking I noticed that Dominic Lewes was walking away from his pitch. With a man.
The man was taller than Dominic and from the side looked to be a lot older. He had a travel bag in his hand – probably just got off the train. I told Sharon I would phone her, then kissed her goodbye again hurriedly, feeling her cold hand on the side of my face. The cab U-turned and just made the lights before heading along the Euston Road towards the Westway. I waved. Then I walked off after Dominic Lewes and the man to whom he was about to purvey the delights of his fifteen-year-old body.
Chapter Five
Next morning I woke up at eight, got up at quarter past, and showered. I hadn’t had more than half a bottle of wine and three or four slugs of John Power’s last night and Mr Hangover (unlike Mr Phone Bill) had not decided to pay me a visit. I wrapped a towel round my waist and, ignoring the washing up, made a cafetiere of light Colombian and two slices of toast with Lincolnshire honey. I set the pot down on a tile on my table, next to the file with Luke’s poems in it, which I’d taken out of my bag last night but hadn’t read yet. I thought about going through them now. I stared at the file lying on the table next to my ever-dying orange plant. Poetry – before 9 a.m.? Later.