‘Oh Joe …’
She hadn’t meant to say anything. She looked quickly away.
‘What?’ He tried to look her challengingly in the eye, but he couldn’t hold her gaze.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. She turned to face him properly. ‘Look, Joe, I’ll be honest. I’m worried about Gary. Even when he’s been working on something we can’t see, in the past he’s usually let us know where he is. Or usually lets his wife know, and she’s not heard from him.’
‘Is she worried?’
‘Not yet. But she’s getting there. And I’ve got a bad feeling about this, Joe.’
‘I’m sure you have. You wouldn’t have come all this way otherwise.’
‘I know. And I know I’m asking you a lot, Joe, but …’ She reached out, placed her hand on his thigh.
He looked at her, opened his mouth to speak.
Then: a noise from the back of the house. Falling wood. A door opening. Donovan stood up swiftly.
‘Bastard!’
He ran to the back of the house, hangover slipping away. The door was open. The door to the one completed room in the house. He had closed it firmly when he left it. He always did.
He opened it fully. And stopped dead.
Sharkey stood in the centre of the room, staring at the walls, his features circular with amazement. He turned at Donovan’s entrance. The look of anger on Donovan’s face spread to his. He became defensive.
‘Now, look, I was just … I had no idea …’
‘Get out.’ Donovan’s voice was low. Like the rumbling and creaking of an old dam before cracking and unleashing a devastating tidal wave. ‘Get out. Now.’
‘I …’
Donovan was on him. He pushed Sharkey to the floor, hands around his throat, squeezing hard.
‘Bastard!’ Donovan spat the word into his face. ‘You had no right to be in here. No right!’
Sharkey clawed at Donovan’s hands. It was no use. They were like a constricting collar of rock. The lawyer’s face began to turn a deep shade of purple. His eyes rolling to the back of his head.
‘Bastard!’
Sharkey’s hands began to slip away. Feebly grabbing air, then nothing. His body began to still.
‘Joe! For God’s sake, what are you doing?’
Donovan looked at the man as if seeing him for the first time. Realization began to dawn on him. He pulled his hands away and, eyes staring, slumped against the nearest wall breathing heavily.
He was aware of Maria crossing to the prone body, trying to re-engage it with consciousness. She seemed to be succeeding.
Donovan felt hot, nauseous. His body felt like lead and stone, his arms water. He watched Maria break off from her ministrations, look around the room. Saw it through her eyes. Filtered it through her consciousness.
Panting, he stared. From the other three walls the same face stared back at him. A boy. Dark-haired, eyes bright. Sometimes playful, sometimes serious. Sometimes with either parent or an older girl. Any permutation. Sometimes alone. From birth to six years old. Ageing only so far and no further.
All photos: originals, blow-ups, scans. Snipped and grafted, placed in images both real and imaginary, collages of memory and remembrance, wish fulfilment and fantasy.
And among the photos, newspaper clippings. Preserved and yellowing, headlines screaming, riffing on the same theme:
Boy Vanishes without Trace
No Clues in Hunt for Missing Six-Year-Old
Tragic David – Why Did No One See Him?
Against the far wall, folders and box files, all labelled:
Police Reports
Missing Persons Reports
Results of Public Appeals
Whole housing estates contained within: dead ends, cul-de-sacs, blind alleys, all round the houses, round in circles, no entries.
Then back to the photos. An evolutionary pictorial life. Birth and home. School. Family and friends. David on holiday in Dorset, in France. Collages of memory and remembrance. David in Disneyland, on colour-supplement white-sand paradise beaches. Collages of wish fulfilment and fantasy.
Donovan panted, looked at the other two people in the room.
Sharkey seemed to be coming round, Maria helping him up on to his elbows. His face was scarlet, his eyes fearful.
‘Sorry …’
Maria looked around again.
‘Sorry, Joe …’
Donovan said nothing, stared ahead as if he was invisible, as if he couldn’t see or hear the other two.
‘No.’ Sharkey was struggling to speak. His voice sounded raspy, broken. ‘My fault. I shouldn’t … I’m sorry.’
Sharkey tried to get to his feet. Maria, with painful slowness, helped him.
‘I didn’t realize it was so …’ Sharkey sighed. ‘It must still be painful for you.’
Donovan nodded slowly and deliberately.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Now fuck off.’
Maria nodded. ‘Suppose we asked for that. Sorry, Joe.’
Donovan stared straight ahead. ‘Just leave me alone.’ His voice sounded small in his own head. Fragile and easily broken.
The other two turned to leave, Sharkey supported by Maria. As he reached the door he stopped, turned.
‘I don’t suppose,’ he said, voice as shaky as his body, ‘that Maria told you the deal?’
Donovan looked up slightly. Maria looked at Sharkey, frowning.
‘Deal?’
‘Yes,’ said Sharkey, the ghost of a lawyer’s glint returning to his eye, ‘the deal. You help us to find Gary Myers, negotiate on our behalf, and we help you find your son.’
Donovan pulled himself swiftly to his feet, ignoring the reeling in his head.
‘David? You know where he is?’
‘No,’ said Sharkey, ‘I didn’t say that. I said that if you help us, we’ll do what we can to help you.’
Maria shook her head in disbelief. This was never part of the plan. She opened her mouth to speak. Sharkey, gently but firmly, placed a restraining hand on her arm, looked her straight in the eye, shook his head in admonition. Donovan, eyes only for Sharkey, missed the subtle gesture.
‘How?’ said Donovan.
‘By giving you access to as many resources as we can, access to files, the means to follow up leads and sightings … What do you say, Mr Donovan?’
Sharkey smiled, seemingly back to his previous self.
Maria turned away, shook her head.
‘Hmm? Have we got a deal?’
Donovan stared at him, hope rising behind his eyes. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘yeah. We’ve got a deal.’
Sharkey stuck out his hand. Donovan took it. They shook.
Donovan suddenly noticed the rain had stopped.
3
Jamal woke up, pulled his jacket around him, suppressed a shiver.
He unfolded his legs, cramp- and cold-hardened, slowly uncurled his body from its foetal shape, stretched the aches and pains away and yawned.
He didn’t feel awake. He didn’t feel like he had slept.
The BMW’s back seat had been hard and unyielding at the start of its life, but a decade and a half of over- and misuse had left it spewing stuffing and thrusting, rusted springs, rendering it unfit to take the weight of bodies. But the choice for Jamal had been either that or the street. And he had spent enough time on the street to know that he should take whatever was on offer.
The car sat wheel-less in a yard at the back of an empty house on a Gateshead housing estate. The estate was long and narrow, each house more abandoned than the last, this one, charred and blackened with windowpanes of nailed-on, damp-warped plywood, at the furthest end. The fag end.
Jamal swung his legs to the floor. No longer box-white trainers crunched on broken glass, plastic. He stretched again, shivered, held his arms about him. He wished he had some weed for a smoke, a couple of rocks to get him going, anything. He felt the bulge in his inside pocket. The minidisc that would make him rich. He smiled. Drew strength from that.
He got out of the car, looked around. The yard had become a repository for the estate’s casual discards, an open tip legitimized by consensus. Old plastic milk bottles, cans, fast-food packaging, an old sofa, a rotting, rusting fridge. An urban consumer graveyard.
He had stayed there one night. He couldn’t take another.
Joe Donovan. The name on the disc. There had been no Joe Donovan at the newspaper he had called. So he mentioned the other name on the disc: Gary Myers. That opened doors. Features, then editorial. Then someone called Maria, who said she was the editor. He told her the names he had heard. Wouldn’t give his own. The voice in his headphones at the start of the disc:
‘Look, Mr Myers—’
‘Call me Gary. If that makes it any easier for you.’
A sigh, then:
‘All right. Gary …’
Shuddered at the memory of the hotel room.
Life and death, he had told her. Life and fucking death.
But it didn’t come for free.
She had paused, played for time, said she had to find Joe Donovan, for Jamal to leave his number, get back to him. He wouldn’t; he would call her a day later. Two days, she had said.
Then hung up.
He had scoped the city then, looked for comparable places to what he was used to. Found an arcade on Clayton Street. He had felt safe in the arcade; like home from home even in a strange city. But he had attracted looks. The kids, the adults, were all, apart from the Asian owner and a couple of Asian kids, white. He was the only black kid. No outright hatred in the looks, just curiosity, some suspicion. Like they had never seen a black youth in real life and were waiting for him to do something. Like they had never heard a London accent except for Eastenders.
Normally he considered himself light skinned. But not here. Here, he felt blacker than black, darker than dark. He wondered again just where this city was. And how far from London he had come.
Yet for all that he had felt something like kinship with some of the players. He had caught another youth’s eye occasionally, and a connection had been made. A commonality shared beyond skin colour, a two-way mirror: I know you. I know your life. I know the ways you get money.
About the same age but tall, blond and white.
‘You Jermaine Jenas?’ the blond youth had said.
Jamal hadn’t known what he was talking about. And that accent. Not Scottish because he’d heard that one on TV. But not English either. Jamal had let the shutter drop; face blank, eyes flat.
‘His brother, anyway.’
The blond boy had smiled. And Jamal had got that feeling again. That shared commonality that went beyond skin colour. Hustler to hustler.
‘You rap? MC?’
Jamal had shrugged. ‘Bit. Back at my ends, you know?’
‘I’m Si.’
‘Jamal.’
And that was it. Jamal scored some rocks off Si, smoked them with him in a park. Got that buzz, almost told him what he was planning. Si had asked Jamal back to his, a house he shared with friends, to stay there. Jamal had refused, something about the boy he didn’t like. Besides, he had Bruce. And his hotel room.
He stayed with Bruce long enough to be fed and fucked. Then awoke early and left, lifting the sleeping sicko’s wallet, leaving him to explain its absence when he eventually woke up.
Then he had walked. Over the bridges, the sun rising as he went, breathing clouds in the cold. On the Redheugh he had rifled the wallet, found a hundred and twenty pounds in notes, several cards and the usual shit. The Blockbuster card. The store cards. The grinning family. He pocketed the cash and cards, dumped the rest into the Tyne. Watched the opened wallet plummet, a dying black crow slowly beating its old, leathery wings for the last time, into the water where it was welcomed with a soft splash.
Over the bridge to Gateshead.
A ghost town, he thought, but had found a McDonald’s. Same shit the world over, he had thought, drawing comfort from that. He had a breakfast blowout, eating as much as he could, draining Bruce’s money like cheap lager pissed away up a back alley wall. Keeping some for later, to score some rocks and weed.
He walked on, past a newsagent, a billboard banner headline proclaiming:
Fears Grow for Missing Scientist
Jamal sighed. At least the scientist had someone missing him.
He had sat down then, by the bus station, watched what was happening around him. The place coming to life; buses in and out, passengers on and off, up and down the escalators to the Metro, going somewhere, coming back, moving with purpose. Jamal sat, watched, waited. Like a kid at an aquarium, seeing a whole different world before him. He never admitted it aloud, but sometimes he wanted to be in that world, going to work or school, coming home to a proper family, having his dinner, watching TV, going out with his mates, going to bed. But he could no more join that world than he could live underwater with the fish in the aquarium. So he sat and watched. And waited.
He marked his life by waiting. For punters. Money. The next high. To get dark so he could go raving. Waiting. To make a fucking phone call.
Sometimes in that stillness, that inaction, an emptiness opened up within him. And he was more alone than anyone had ever been.
He felt that emptiness creeping up, so had stood up and walked away.
And that had been his day. On his aimless travels, he had found the car in the housing estate, guessed it would make a safe place to sleep for the night. To hide. Bruce or the police wouldn’t be looking for him there.
He started walking again, looked back at the broken BMW. Probably the same age as him. Used, abused, discarded. He wouldn’t allow that to happen to him.
Soon, he would be able to afford a new BMW all of his own.
He headed back towards the bridges, back to Newcastle. To the arcade, the boy with the rocks.
Counting off time until he could call again.
As he walked, he smiled.
Used, abused, discarded.
He felt the minidisc in his inside pocket, the cash in his jeans pocket.
He wouldn’t allow that to happen to him.
An electronic scream, a synthesized death rattle, a fall and then the figure quickly faded from existence. Failed in his mission. The screen flashed up: GAME OVER. The credits rolled. Jamal waited.
‘Fuck.’ An angry sigh.
He hadn’t even made the top ten. Low, low score.
‘Fuck.’
He walked, not waiting for the screen to flash, exhort him to play again, show him optimistic highlights of what he could be doing. He walked the aisles of the Clayton Street arcade, his home from home, face lit by the ever-changing nauseous rainbow strobe of the machines, ears bombarded with electro/metal/hip-hop signature tunes.
He found a machine to stand at, fed it a pound coin, began to play. Hoped the optimism of cyber genocide would give him a self-esteem-raising high score. High enough to chart.
He shot, killed, saw blood fly, limbs hacked off. Distanced himself from dismemberment, rode only for kicks and high scores. Then he became aware of someone watching him. He turned, saw the blond boy, Si, from the day before. He lost concentration and was killed. The blond boy smiled.
‘Back again, Jermaine Jenas?’ Si laughed.
He turned to the boy exasperated, anger beginning to bubble within. ‘Who’s this Jenas guy, anyway?’ he asked.
The boy laughed. ‘Plays for Newcastle. You look just like him. Could be his brother.’
Jamal nodded. The anger subsided.
Silence.
‘So,’ Si said, ‘what you doin’ here again?’
Jamal remembered the cards in his pocket.
‘Sellin’,’ he said.
‘Sellin’ what?’
‘Cards. Credit. Debit.’ Jamal shrugged like it was no big deal. ‘You know.’
‘Let’s see.’
Jamal looked around. ‘Not here, man,’ he said. ‘Why? You interested?’
‘Not me,’ said Si, ‘but I know someone.’
Si began to walk to the exit. ‘You comin’?’
Jamal shrugged. ‘Yeah,’ he said as casually as possible and followed the blond boy out.
Behind him the abandoned machine flashed, offered him another life.
‘So where did you say you got these?’
Jamal looked at the speaker. His first reaction on seeing him: fuck me, you’re a fat cunt. Any more an’ you be wearin’ a dress. But he had kept that to himself. Because of the eyes. They didn’t go with the body. They belonged to someone whom you knew not to fuck with.
Si had told Jamal as much on the way there, over a Big Mac at McDonald’s.
‘You’re from London, aren’t you? So what you doin’ up here?’
Jamal slurped up his cola, felt a pinprick of pain between his eyes from the cold.
‘Needed a change,’ he said.
‘You runnin’?’
Jamal looked dead-eyed, shrugged.
‘You need somewhere to stay?’
The same question as the day before. He thought of the BMW. Just for one night. Then it’s five star all the way.
‘Yeah.’
‘The bloke we’re goin’ to see,’ said Si between mouthfuls, ‘Father Jack. I’ll put in a word for you, yeah?’
Jamal shrugged again, nodded.
‘Howay, then.’
Jamal followed Si to the Metro station. They emerged from the tunnel, went over a concrete bridge high above a dwindling, weed- and garbage-decorated river, a strange, curving block of flats to the right of them, like a huge, multi-coloured wall with windows.
‘Where’s this, then?’
‘Byker,’ said Si.
They got off the train, left the station. The area looked derelict, boarded-up shops, rubble-strewn emptiness. Scary pubs and barricaded pawnshops the only things thriving. People moved around, went about their lives oblivious. Air close, sky dark, a weight pressing down. The kind of place Jamal had seen on the news, a reporter standing in front of saying, ‘And life gets back to normal after the shelling.’ When he thought about it, the kind of place he lived in in London.
The Mercy Seat Page 4