by Lee Markham
They laugh at that and fail to notice a group of older kids fall in behind them.
‘Oi! Little John.’ One of the older kids calls him out.
John spins on his heel, all laughter evaporating immediately from every cell of his being. He almost sobers up. Almost. He slams his hand into his pocket and takes hold of something, and clicks it a couple of notches. He doesn’t bring it out. Not yet.
‘Wha…?’
The bigger kids bowl down the street towards them.
‘Where’s Cal?’
‘Dunno.’
‘Your brother owes us.’
‘I dunno where he is.’
Older kids advancing. John and Bobby inching backward away from them.
Then one of them, the one whose name John knows is Ricky, and whom Cal owes, he stops, narrows his eyes and suggests through drawn lips, ‘Well, maybe you can give him a message, yeah?’
John spins and bolts. No hesitation.
He knows that the message would be written in cuts and bruises and has no intention of delivering it. Bobby is slower off the mark and swears in anguish, but pure animal terror gives his step a spring that quickly sees him make up the difference. The older kids give chase. Bobby peels away down a side road, and John heads straight on. He’s sprinting for his life, pumping his arms, the knife now out and clenched in his left hand as he runs. The older kids hesitate for a moment at the junction where the younger boys went their separate ways, but it is hesitation enough. A van turns across and in front of them, pulling into the side road, cutting them off. They kick and scream at the van, which screeches to a halt. And suddenly their argument is elsewhere. They have fresh beef.
But John doesn’t look back.
He is unaware the chase is now over. His addled, fearstruck, oxygen-hungry mind propels him onwards for two more blocks before a stitch forces him to slow down to a jog. Only then does he dare glance back over his shoulder. He can’t see them. He looks again. Still can’t see them. He turns then and jogs backward, his eyes darting every which way. And he still can’t see them. But he can see Bobby now, chasing to catch up with him.
Which is when Ricky smashes into him from behind.
John screams, flinches down towards the ground, swivels and sticks the knife into his leg. Except it’s not Ricky at all.
It’s just some kid.
Danny looks at John. John looks back at Danny and is so relieved it’s not one of those cunts, he bursts out laughing. It happens so quick, no one even notices. Just kids making a ruckus. Danny looks down at his leg and then back up at John.
It hurts.
He hopes it doesn’t make him late for bolognaise.
Or Harry Potter.
It’s got werewolves.
John clicks the blade back into the handle and pockets the knife without thinking.
‘Fuck sake, John… Jesus…’ Bobby gasping for breath. ‘Lost ’em ages ago.’
Bobby then sees the little kid stood there regarding them, a weird look in his eyes. ‘What the fuck are you looking at?’ and he shoves him. Danny goes quietly down. Then they leave him there, skipping away into the shadows, laughing and whooping, kicking cans and spitting.
And for a moment, no one comes to Danny. For just a moment he is alone.
No bolognaise for Danny tonight. No.
No nothing for Danny tonight. But these thoughts can’t be his. They must be lies.
He refocuses.
Gotta get home.
Dinner ready soon.
Leg hurts.
Mummy fix it.
Harry Potter.
Werewolves.
Asterix and Tintin.
A homeless person then emerges from the shadows and cautiously approaches him. Takes the measure of him. But Danny is elsewhere.
Harry and werewolves and Asterix and Tintin.
The tramp pulls rags tight over his face, his hood down low. He sidles over to Danny and leans down and, taking the child’s face in his hands says, ‘Look at me, child.’
The child’s face turns, but it is not the child that speaks. It is something other, something older. Its eyes are paler, its soul darker. It looks up at the tramp and says, ‘Take your scum hands off me, rat-filth.’
And the tramp lets him go. Lowers him back down to the ground. And he backs quickly away. The tramp turns and heads away into the early-evening darkness and leaves
Danny on the ground. Danny then rallies. The flight receptors in his brain now firing on all cylinders, granting him one last measure of light before the closing of the curtains. He is just yards from the stairs up to the flat. Just minutes from home. Minutes from bolognaise and Harry Potter and Mummy fixing his leg. Minutes.
His leg feels funny. It doesn’t even hurt. Except it kind of hurts more than anything he’s ever felt in his whole life. A pain so vast and so absolute he can’t find its edges and so can’t properly take it in. And, swimming in the blanketing darkness of that pain, there is a creature. He can see it there, circling. It thinks he can’t see it. But he can. But he knows if he ignores it, then it won’t catch him.
Because he’s got the answers that’ll fix this situation.
He’s got bolognaise and Harry Potter.
He’s got Asterix and Tintin.
He’s got stairwell and strangers and holding his hand and he’ll be OK and fading away and swimming out into the void. He goes carefully. Because he knows something’s out there. Swimming. Looking for something to eat.
And it’s not werewolves.
It’s not werewolves…
It’s not…
It’s…
3
Danny was already dead when they wheeled him in.
It was 5.32 p.m.
The wound on his leg had been staunched in the ambulance, but he’d bled too much and his heart had already given up. It had given up before the paramedics had even got to him. But it would’ve been rude not to try. So they’d patched his leg and hammered his chest. Zapped him a couple of times too. They’d all read stories. Watched films.
Sometimes they came back.
Usually they didn’t.
This time, he hadn’t.
He was ten years old.
He’d been found in a stairwell in a forest of concrete, in a place that smelt of piss. He had nearly made it home, where he thought he’d be safe.
He hadn’t made it.
Wouldn’t have changed anything if he had.
The builders who had found him had tied some cord round his upper thigh and had succeeded in delaying the inevitable. One of them had held his hand and had told him to hold on. They would all remember the look in the boy’s eyes as he’d died. Wide eyes. Scared, yes, but never aware that it was over. His eyes had said, ‘It’ll be OK’, all the way up to the edge. Then they had dilated and glazed over as he’d gone over the drop and into the darkness. The builders would remember that. And it would keep them up at night.
For a while.
The paramedics had radioed ahead and wheeled him straight into one of the furthest-flung assessment rooms. One of the rooms that rarely saw any degree of actual treatment. These were the rooms where they wheeled the dead. And the very-soon-to-be-dead. Out of the way. A facilities manager had once produced a traffic-flow report and had advised that these rooms were the rooms to which any volume of footfall would cause the most amount of disruption to the unit as a whole. And so they’d been set aside for those that needed the least attention. And those had been the dead, and the sure-to-be-dying. The rooms constituted a cursed appendix to the body of the A&E department. A glottal stop between here and the morgue.
Danny lay there, dead, and he waited.
After the paramedics and the doctors and an initial burst of morbid professional interest and activity, a nurse had come in and looked at him and checked his pulse and scribbled on his notes. She had looked at his face and had felt sad. He looked like a nice boy. But then they always did when they were dead.
She had wondered where his pa
rents were.
There’d be a call at some point.
From the police. But not until later. Once they’d called, his family – once they’d made the call. Reported him missing.
They’d apologise for probably wasting their time. They always did.
The parents always stalled before calling the police, worried. As if they thought calling the police with their concerns would somehow transmute terrified imagination into appalling reality. Turn gold into lead. An inverted alchemy. And tonight, that call would do just that.
The nurse hoped that his parents left it as long as they could bear. That they would prolong their anger – ‘Why hasn’t he called!’ – and then savour their fear – ‘OK, if you hear from him, could you let us know’ – because as soon as they made that call, it would be over. They would be parents no more. Even if he had siblings, they would be parents no more. They would become something else. Not parents living the dream, but just people with children who now truly understood the abyss over which they teetered. Because they’d be falling into it, and would be evermore.
And their boy would be dead.
She looks at him, and shakes her head. Then she pulls the sheet up and over his face, hangs the notes back on the end of the bed and pads out of the room.
The door swishes quietly closed behind her.
And the boy sits up.
The sheet falls away and his eyes open.
They are pale. Blue irises. They’d been brown, like his skin, when he’d died. But now they are pale, as is his skin without blood. He has changed.
He pushes the sheet down and kicks his feet free.
His school trousers are charcoal-grey. But they are black, and damp, round a mean, clean tear on the inside of his upper-right thigh. He swings his legs round and hangs his feet over the edge of the bed.
He sways a little.
He holds on to the edge of the mattress with both hands and closes his eyes.
Then he unfastens the trousers, kicks off his school shoes and pushes the trousers down and off. He raises them and turns the stain to his face, balls them up and pushes his open, thirsty mouth into the wet fabric and sucks. He gets a taste, the slightest quenching, then turns the trousers to seek more blood. He does this over and over and over again, until he is satisfied that he has taken as much as they have to offer.
Then he puts the trousers down on the bed beside him. His face now wears crimson round his mouth and across his cheeks like a clown who’s been punched. He looks at the wound on his thigh. It has been sutured, and it is smaller than one might expect, but a part of him, a new part of him, one that wasn’t there before, understands just how unimpressive a fatal wound can be. How narrow the exit can be for life to depart a body.
And it is this part of him, this new part, which whispers to him and tells him he must leave.
So he pulls his trousers back on, drops down from the bed. He wobbles – he is still far too thirsty – no longer faint, but still some way from stable on his feet. He leans against the bed and wheedles his feet back into his shoes. The back of his left shoe folds in under his heel, and he hikes it out deftly with the forefinger of his right hand.
He moves to the door, leans in against it and listens.
There’s a whole bunch of hubbub out there, but that might work in his favour.
He pulls the door open a crack and peeps out into the glare.
To the left, looking across the width of the door and past the hinges, lies the tumult and bedlam of the A&E department. No escape that way.
He scans the hallway, looking for one of the green signs that indicate which way to bolt when the place goes up in flames. Green sign, picture of a white door with a green stickman running through it. An arrow and two words: Fire Exit.
When he finds it, it points the way he’d hoped. Away from the hubbub. As well it might. Back past the door to his room and away.
He ducks out without hesitation and walks away from A&E. He doesn’t look back. Seconds later he is through a double set of swing doors and into a lightless corridor. Lightless apart from a green light ahead. Another arrow. Another set of swing doors. These lead out into a stairwell and the breadcrumb trail of green signs guides him down two storeys to a final set of doors. These doors are closed and a last, red sign warns that they are alarmed.
Once again, he doesn’t hesitate. He smashes through the doors and darts quickly across the narrow drive at the back of the building and into the multi-storey car park opposite.
A siren starts to bleat and there is a sudden flurry of almost activity. People stop and look around. They look at each other and shrug their shoulders. They look for someone to tell them what to think, what to do. Is this a drill? What?
The boy finds a shadow in which to lurk and observe the indecision play out. A security guard approaches the open fire escape from the outside. The guard looks left, then right, then left again. Then he speaks into his radio, steps through the door and pulls it closed behind him. A few moments later the alarm falls silent.
The absence of relief is as omnipresent as was the absence of concern.
And the world trundles on.
The boy ducks deeper into the car park, bolting at a crouch between cars parked bumper to bumper. The neon lights running in strips down the aisle occasionally stab at his newly sensitised eyes. The smell of lead and monoxide turns his stomach.
Into another stairwell and up to the roof. He needs to get his bearings.
Up and up, until he is out and beneath the orange-hued nightscape, a very few of the brightest stars peeping meekly through the torn blanket of grizzly cloud. It is a cold and cruddy night.
He walks to the furthest corner on this highest level and peers out across the city. His vision is keen, honed. Hawklike. To most the towers of the poisoned vista laid out before him would be a smorgasbord of indistinguishable concrete hutches. But to him, this boy, this dead boy, with something old now very much alive within him, they all look different. They all speak to him. They each sing their own song of despair.
He prowls the rooftop, looking and hearing and feeling, searching for the beacon that will tell him where to go.
Because out there, somewhere, behind one of those countless, dead-eyed windows, someone is looking back at him. And that someone is the other half of him.
And he needs to find him before he splits again.
CHAPTER FOUR
MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS
1
I stand outside the door and wait. I am also on the inside of the door struggling to reach for the lock to let myself in. The me inside is too short, so I summon the dog.
It skiffles down the hallway, struggling now. I’m not a good fit for it. I am too much. The lower animals quickly fall apart when my kind adopt them. And I’ve allowed the child to snack on him – just enough to keep the boy going so that we can do what needs doing here. But the dog is weakening. It will probably serve me – us – for a few more hours before it collapses. It will be enough. It will have to be.
I have the dog crouch down and allow the child to sit astride his back just below his stocky shoulders. Then I have the dog stand. His legs shaking a little with the extra weight of the child. He gets breathless quickly. Within the confines of his tiny mind he pines for release and is consumed by primal fear. He’s too dumb to understand his situation, other than to know that he has been caught in the jaws of a predator much larger than himself.
He lifts the child up, and I have the boy push himself upright, leaning against the wall and the door for balance. He tiptoes and reaches for the lock. Unlike the dog, the child seems positively brimming with life. Eager to learn. Desperate to impress. He takes my hand, in here, as if he’s been waiting his whole life for me, and now that I’m here he will do anything.
That he will do as he’s told is enough.
He flicks the lock, and I push the door open from the outside. It swings open and the older boy, the one I have brought here from the hospital, the one who so ably
shoplifted a few items for the little one en route, puts his arms round the baby and lifts him gently to the floor.
The older child is more complicated than the younger one. He doesn’t take my hand. But he understands he should be dead, and were it not for me then he would be. He is consumed by something new and profound, something which he has never tasted before in his young, innocent life. He doesn’t much care for the taste of it yet, but he seems compelled to keep taking sips. It is anger. Rage, in fact. But it is muddled with childish images of dog-men, and rat-food, and his being denied these simple things. These things I don’t understand. He is a ball of confusion and wayward emotion, like a pupating caterpillar about to emerge as something new. He went in as a child. He will emerge as, well… he will emerge as something more like myself. So, for now, he is wary of me, but our purpose is common enough that we can share it and he is happy enough to work with me. He wants the child that stuck the knife in his leg. I want the knife.
I send the dog back to the threshold of the living room to continue his observance of the rats that remain unconscious in their pit, bathing in dirty opiate dreams beneath the sickly glow of their TV and its looping images of rutting vermin.
We head through to the child’s disgusting nest, with its flyblown curtains and the landfill scraps the child thinks of as his toys. All of them dead. All of them decaying. We go through quietly. We have some preparations to make.
I have the older child empty out the small cloth bag he has brought with him onto the mattress. The bag itself was lifted from the same charity shop as the cheap polyester wedding suit and shirt that fall from it: 18–24 months. Peter is small for his age, undernourished, so it might be a little baggy. We’ll see. A pair of hairdresser’s scissors also drops out, and a packet of disposable razors. Two ten-metre reels of nylon cord. And the last thing: some shower gel.