‘I wouldn’t!’ protested William Here.
‘Barney and Lee are in there with him. They reckon he’s asleep but I think he’s pretending. We need to get back and check on them. Bring the fags with you. And bring that crappy bike! The last thing we want is someone finding it and getting interested in how it ended up here.’
A door opened in the building, black against black, and the three of them disappeared inside, dragging the Pacific Blue behind them like a piece of junk.
Chapter 5
So that was that. The silence came down again, a great damp blanket you could never push back up. The blanket sagged right down over my heart and for a while I stood there doing nothing and thinking nothing. Then I counted the names I’d heard. Five. The scumbag twins had turned into quintuplets. And they’d done so much damage to my bike what with all that dragging and kicking that it was probably wrecked, or soon would be.
I couldn’t fight five of them, even supposing I could get inside that big black building. Christy just on his own sounded like a nutjob. As for the talk of keys and someone pretending to be asleep, well, I didn’t give a rat’s arse about any of that. I hardly even realised I’d heard it till afterwards, so fixated was I on that bike.
Minutes passed while I wondered what to do next.
An enormous spread of rusted wire stood close by, grown through with weeds and bushes. It was big solid wire, too thick to bounce around. I pushed my way through to a tiny space in the middle. It smelt of animals and stagnant water but I didn’t care about that. Nobody would see me there unless they shone a torch directly in and I couldn’t imagine Christy or Deano or William Here having one of those.
I thought about the Big Bag at home, the letters and packets still waiting to be delivered.
None of them would be going out today.
Maybe the Pacific Blue wasn’t so badly damaged. It was new, after all. Well-made. A quality product. Maybe I’d be able to fix it up, if I could get my hands on it.
Those people inside – those teenagers – they had to leave sometime. Didn’t they have homes or schools, or jobs even, to go to?
That thought decided me. What else was I going to do anyway? I’d wait till the whole bloody lot of them pissed off and then find a way to break in. Smash a window if I had to, it wouldn’t be the first time. Most of them round there had reinforcing wire but if you went at them hard enough you could get through fine. Once inside I’d find my bike and get out. It was obvious they couldn’t care less about it. Maybe it was lying forgotten already. If all that was too dangerous in the dark, I’d wait for dawn.
Easy.
I settled down, pulling my jumper up over my head and down over my knees, trying to stretch it in both directions. I was soaked right through by now and shivering but at least the wire and the bushes were keeping the worst of the rain off. The jumper was one of those Mum had knitted from a pattern. Normally I didn’t wear it, but it was the first thing my hand grabbed for when the chase began. I looked down at it and wondered what Mum would say, me ruining something she’d made so slowly and so carefully. Then I reminded myself how Mum wasn’t thinking about jumpers any more. There were a lot of things she wasn’t thinking about any more, and a whole lot of new things she couldn’t stop thinking about.
Scary things. Random, impossible things.
Whispers in the schoolyard, always behind my back.
Aidan’s mum’s a psycho … Aidan’s mum’s a psycho …
I hated hearing those whispers, because they were right.
Chapter 6
It wasn’t long before I was feeling a bit psycho myself. I’d sat there in the middle of that heap of rusted wire for hours, or so it seemed. And that smell. At first it hadn’t bothered me. Animal. Fox it must be. White snout, rust-red ears. And somehow I was the one leaping and jumping with a red bushy tail nailed to my arse. Being chased by a shape in the sky, a threatening cloud, something that was about to fall on me like the biggest waterfall you’d ever see. Here it came, slapping me round the face and shoulders. I crouched, threw my arms over my head, tried to protect myself. In the distance a rainbow. Letters and packets whirled about me by the thousand. The queen’s head bulged, fixing me in the eyes, fierce, full of punishment. I tried to shovel the letters into the Big Bag but there were too many. I tried to run but they followed me, fell on top of me, collapsing paper houses and anyhow I couldn’t run properly because my feet were changing shape. I tried to speak, to shout for help, but the only sound coming out was a bark and then letters were flying like wasps into my mouth.
My head jerked up.
A van, a white battered-up Ford Transit, was reversing, driving away.
Must’ve nodded off.
I shuddered away from the familiar sweaty nightmare, yanked my head back into real time. The scumbags had a van? How many people inside? More than one in front I reckoned but I couldn’t be sure, only caught a glimpse. With vans you never know anyway.
I couldn’t wait any longer. I knew that much. I was freezing up, my warmth and energy congealing like sausage grease in a cold frying pan. Even so I forced myself to hang on another couple of minutes before trying the door they’d gone in by. No luck. Shut tight, you couldn’t even prise your fingers past the metal tongue welded round its edge. I wasn’t getting in that way. I ran round the building searching for other doors, windows, basement entrances, anything. The sky was brightening in one corner. Before the whole thing with Mum started I’d never even seen the dawn, at least not since I was a baby. I don’t mean the orange dawn, the nice bit where the sun shows itself, I mean the very first grey streaks that somehow make you feel old inside because you know the only other people seeing it are the sick and the sad and the bloody ancient milkman.
There. Bingo. A ladder going straight up the side of the building, tall weeds tangling the bottom. Fire escape. The metal rungs were like ice in my hands but from the top you could see everything, all the little houses and schools and shops and roads, and standing still for a moment I wondered why I’d never been up there before because looking down on everything like that made you feel you were king of the whole wide world.
In one corner of the flat factory roof there was a sort of hut thing with a door hanging by one hinge.
I pushed it aside. Steps led down.
Pray they were all in that van, driving away. Or at least that nutjob Christy was. He’d sounded like someone who’d get himself behind a steering wheel the minute his legs were long enough, no worries about that.
Pray the place was empty.
Head booming with blood-drums all the same. Think. Where would they put it? Ground floor. Obvious. No point taking it anywhere else.
Leaves on the stairs, feet skidding in mountains of pigeon droppings.
Two minutes later I was on the ground floor, dirty windows letting in just enough light to see by. Everywhere and everything silent like I’d landed on an acre of moon. Piles of rubble lay scattered and the wet winter smell of a forgotten place hung in the air. Massive machines rotted on metal plinths. I went up to one of them. What had it done before the rust came? Chopping or packing or sorting or moulding or cutting. A control box dangled from a cable, three white buttons and one red. The top button said START. I watched my finger press it. Stupid. But nothing happened.
Forget the machines. Beyond them there was a corridor. Offices once, must have been. I stopped, listened. Heard nothing. Very very slowly I opened a door. Dust and rubbish, a turned-over table, a noticeboard with green drawing pins, a faded sign that read This is a Work Station not a Pigsty So Tidy Up after Yourself. Next to it, a doorless room stuffed with old-fashioned orange furniture, a filthy works canteen. Three of the four walls had random holes sledgehammered all over them so they looked like gigantic slabs of Swiss cheese.
Next to that, a bit further along, a door secured with a silver hasp and padlock.
The padlock didn’t have a key in it and it didn’t mean the Pacific Blue was inside but this was the most likely-l
ooking place I’d seen so far. And just that padlock on its own, with its steel-barred U being the only bit of shiny new metal among all that dirt and rust and mould, was enough to get me super-curious.
They must all have been in that van. I felt sure of it now. Nobody locks a room when they’re still inside it themselves, do they?
I tapped my fingers along the top of the frame, the first place you should always look. Nothing. I looked around, moving the toe of my wet trainer about in the dirt and rubbish. Something told me the key was nearby, that they hadn’t taken it with them. I moved up and down the corridor, looking, feeling. My foot brushed a place where the wall and floor met. A piece of plaster fell away. Behind the plaster something glinted.
I took the key and fitted it to the padlock.
Click.
Screw you, Christy. Screw the sodding lot of you.
Inside. A long derelict storeroom. Rectangular windows set high at the far end, their panes mostly smashed by rocks thrown from outside. Clear light coming through, the first clear light for days. Maybe the rainclouds were breaking up at last. One or two of the random sledgehammered holes showed through the breeze block from the canteen next door. Close by, on a pair of wooden pallets that had been arranged side by side, lay a mound of greasy blankets and clothes.
My bike was leaning against the far wall. The Pacific Blue frame, the eighteen Shimano gears, the back suspension I’d spent ages adjusting. Scratched up, kicked about, but looking like it’d still work OK. There was other stuff too, among the beer cans and fag ends at that end of the room – other bikes, games consoles, computers, a washing machine, stuff I hardly bothered glancing at.
I went to get the bike and that was when I saw two white eyes staring at me from inside the pile of blankets.
Chapter 7
He was up in a second, moving forward as if to intercept or stop me and I was moving fast too though I can’t tell you in which direction because a tonne of pure distilled fear had suddenly got me speared up and down. I know the muscles in my arms flexed and I know my fists were up and sweat was boiling across the top of my head.
‘Please!’ he cried out. ‘Not again …’
‘Keep away!’ I shouted. ‘Don’t come any nearer!’
‘Let me sleep … At least let me sleep …’
I must’ve looked like I was about to beat hell out of the whole wide world what with my hands pulled back like that, stone-hard fist-blocks, because I saw then that what he was really doing was trying to protect himself.
‘Keep away,’ I warned him again, not dropping the attack position but taking a step closer to the bike – the bike that was propped beyond him.
‘Don’t,’ he rasped. ‘Please, don’t …’
His palms flapped up in a sort of surrender, then he lowered himself back onto the wooden pallets and pulled one of the greasy blankets round his shoulders. I knew by then that he couldn’t be much of a threat, old man that he was. His eyes were so pale they hardly seemed to have any pupils. They stared at me in the clean weak light and my own eyes stared right back.
‘You’re not one of them,’ he said after a moment. ‘Are you?’
‘Look, I don’t know what’s going on here, but—’
‘Want to know? Eh? Want to know?
‘I just need that bike, that one over there, see, and then I’m—’
The old man bent and grabbed his ankle and the ankle rattled and chinked. ‘That’s what’s going on.’
There was a chain, padlocked round so tight that the foot below was coloured up like a plum. Pulling the chain, he showed me how the other end was fastened, again by padlock, onto the wooden pallets.
‘I can drag them a yard or so. Then it gets too painful.’
‘Jesus.’ My fists went down. The pallets were the big heavy kind, full of giant metal staples. ‘Haven’t you tried to escape?’
I remembered then the scumbags, out in the dark with their glowing cigarette ends, talking about keys and someone pretending to be asleep.
‘Yes. Tried.’
I went closer. Apart from the foot and some purple bruises on his neck and a lot of dried-out yellow hair everything about him was thin and colourless: the cheeks that were scooped out, the eyes that really did seem bleached as if somehow the back of his skull was showing through. He wore cheap sports clothes, a grey Admiral hooded top that reached down almost to his knees, thin tracksuit bottoms, a pair of scuffed-up old Reeboks.
Must be frozen, in this weather.
He settled back into the soft nest he’d made for himself. I saw now there was a dirty cushion for a pillow and even a coverless duvet. That was his bed. There was a bucket too, off to one side, not that I wanted to go anywhere near it.
He gathered the blanket closer round his shoulders and stared at me a bit more.
A bird chirping outside or a cloud passing across the early-morning sun, some new thing, jerked me back into myself just then. It was time to toughen up, time to get back in the centre of my own situation. I’d forgotten the Big Bag, forgotten Mum and how all this with the bike (when it came right down to it) was about her. Whatever was going on here – the stolen stuff, the skinny old guy chained up – it was nothing to do with me. Besides, seeing the chain and the swollen ankle had given me a new appreciation of Christy and his friends. This wasn’t ordinary thieving. Holding someone prisoner. The poor bloke was half dead from starvation. Bad enough if they had a reason for it. If they didn’t, if they were doing it just for laughs, then it was sick. Way way beyond what I’d ever got up to at school with bullying and disruption, so-called.
Sooner or later, Christy and his pals would be coming back. I needed to make sure I wasn’t there when they did.
I edged past the chained-up man and made a grab for the Pacific Blue.
‘I’m going,’ I said. ‘I’m taking this. And if you tell anyone I’ve been here then I’ll come back and I’ll – I’ll …’
‘I understand. Only when they see that’s gone –’ (he nodded towards the bike) – ‘they’ll know someone’s been here.’
‘So?’
I was almost at the door when he whispered, ‘They’ll take it out on me.’
‘What?’
‘They’ll take it out on me. They’ll make me tell – about you.’
I stopped. I looked down at my hands on the saddle and handlebars. Without those to grip I knew they’d be shaking. To tell the truth they hadn’t really stopped since I’d seen his ghostly old eyes watching me from under that pile of blankets. ‘They don’t know who I am,’ I said.
‘Of course. Only …’
‘Only what?’
‘If they made me describe you …’
I stood in the doorway, trying to work it out. This wasn’t the kind of calculation they made you do in maths.
The Big Bag. Impossible to do the Big Bag without a bike. And I needed to do it if I wanted to keep Dad at home, keep him visiting Mum and helping her get better. I needed that bike.
Versus –
If the bike was gone, if the man in the blanket told them about me …
Deano and William Here knew which house they’d pinched the bike from. If Christy then figured out I’d seen their prisoner …
If they were happy locking someone up and starving them, what would they do to me, another teenager?
Those minutes at the end of school, the minutes of jostling escape when anybody and everybody can get at you. A flashing blade out in the road, a lunge nobody notices. A wound in the stomach or side, a body falling to the ground.
Or was I being paranoid? I couldn’t work it out. It was like impossible algebra, life-or-death algebra.
And anyway, what would they do to this poor guy here?
‘I don’t believe they’ll be back tonight,’ he said softly. ‘Don’t worry. You’ve time to decide.’
‘How do you know I’m deciding anything?’
‘Why else would you stop? Not only stopped, but returned. Shows uncertainty.’
&
nbsp; He was right. Without realising it I’d drifted back into the room.
‘Think you’re pretty clever, don’t you?’
‘Not particularly.’
I said nothing. I looked at him, I looked at my bike. I looked at the other bikes. Maybe I should take one of those, a knocked-about one. That way it couldn’t be connected to me. But then there was still the problem of whether or not I could trust blanket-man to keep his mouth shut.
‘Did you come in on the back of a lorry?’
‘Pardon?’
‘My dad, he says you all come in on the backs of lorries. Taking our jobs.’
‘No. I didn’t come in on the back of a lorry.’
‘But you’re not from here, are you? I mean, you’re not like us, British.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘Your accent. It’s … weird.’
‘I’m as British as they come.’
‘Look,’ I said. ‘They nicked my bike and they’ve got you chained up. We’re on the same side, aren’t we?’
‘You tell me.’
‘I mean, that chain – I couldn’t break it, never in a million years …’
‘Suppose not,’ the man said miserably.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Haxforth.’ He bowed his head. ‘At your service.’
I thought about telling him my name then decided No. ‘I really need a bike. So I’m going to take one. Not mine, if it’ll cause too much trouble. Just an old one, that one hidden at the back there. You got a problem with that?’
He shrugged. ‘Every thief for himself.’
I put the Pacific Blue back in its abandoned dusty position and picked my way over to where a beat-up old racing bike stood and hauled it out and made sure it worked OK, brakes and gears and chain. As I wheeled it to the door (Haxforth watching me the whole time) a car soft-roared somewhere in the early-morning silence. The world was coming back to life. Then another one – louder and closer. It probably wasn’t Christy and his pals coming back but I didn’t want to take the chance. It was time to go. Way past time.
Why I Went Back Page 2