by Sarah Butler
Manchester. Birmingham. Dover. Calais. His mum would go mental, but he’d be long gone by the time she got back from work. Stick turned on the radio. There was a scratchy hiss behind the music when he turned it up, plus they were playing shit; he didn’t even know what it was, but it helped to fill up his head with the noise. And it was even better once he got on the motorway, burning down the fast lane, feeling the car groan and strain as he pushed his foot flat against the floor.
Two hours in and he was crawling in traffic near to Birmingham. The car’s fan belt kept squealing like a trapped bird. ‘Nordausques, St Omer, Aire-sur-la-Lys,’ he said, almost too quietly to hear above the radio. ‘Bordeaux, Bilbao, Madrid.’ And then, ‘Hey, dude! What’s with the shit music?’, trying to make his voice sound like Mac’s.
He pictured his mum reading the note, a fag in one hand, the other fussing at her clothes. She’d probably call the police, tell them to chase him down the motorway and bring him home. He was seventeen. He was nearly eighteen. It wasn’t illegal to drive to Spain. ‘I’m going to Spain,’ he said out loud. ‘I am going to Spain.’ He brought his fist down hard on the steering wheel, his eyes tearing up so he could hardly see out of the windscreen. ‘You fucking bastard,’ he said, his voice cracking. ‘You fucking bastarding bastard. Why aren’t you here?’
He took the next exit, drove fast around the roundabout and pulled onto the motorway in the opposite direction. He switched the radio off and the car filled with the noise of the wheezing engine and the buffet of wind against metal. His eyes were tired. His head ached. He had just enough petrol, he reckoned, to get back home.
8
By the time Stick got home it was early evening. The note had gone. His mum was by the back door, smoking. She turned to him and he could see the tension in her jaw, her eyes bright and panicked.
He walked across the room and stood next to her. ‘Can I have a fag?’
She stared at him, then tapped one out of the packet and lit it.
Stick drew the smoke into his lungs and looked at the paved back yard, the shed, the flower bed with the oversized daisies on their too-thin stems. The kids next door were kicking a ball against the fence.
‘You shouldn’t smoke,’ his mum said.
Stick took another drag. ‘I know.’
They stood there in silence, listening to the slap of the football and the rattle of the fence panel.
‘I was thinking you could go to the doctor’s,’ Stick said. He felt her stiffen but carried on. ‘So you can sleep better. I think they can help with that. I could make you an appointment.’
His mum stubbed her cigarette out on the wall, hard enough to break the end in two. ‘I did lamb chops for your tea,’ she said.
‘Mum?’
‘I can put a plate in the microwave. I’ll do that now.’ She went inside and Stick stayed where he was, smoking slowly and thinking he’d like Mac to come back from the dead so he could punch him in the face.
She sat opposite him while he ate. Stick waited for her to say something about the note, about the car, but she just watched him eat, and then as he was about to go up to bed she said, ‘Oh, I nearly forgot,’ and handed him a white plastic bag. ‘Mrs McKinley brought it round,’ she said, watching him carefully. ‘I think she was hoping to see you.’
Stick looked in the bag. A pair of red Nike trainers. Mac’s red Nike trainers. He looked at his mum and she shrugged.
‘I don’t know, love. She said she wanted you to have them. I couldn’t say no.’
Stick stared at the trainers. He remembered Mac wearing them for the first time a couple of months back, the strut he always did when he’d bought something new.
‘She’s in shock. We all are.’
‘And the police?’
‘She didn’t say anything, love.’
Stick touched the inside of one trainer with his forefinger, then snatched his hand away. ‘I’m going to bed.’
‘You can talk to me, Kieran.’
For one brief moment he wanted to lie on the sofa with his head in her lap, the way he used to when he was little, her stroking his hair and them laughing at the TV. He tried to smile. He tried to say thanks, but ended up just shaking his head and walking upstairs, Mac’s shoes banging against his leg.
The whole of the next day the trainers sat by Stick’s bed still in the plastic bag. He kept pulling the edges of it apart so he could look at them, but every time he went to pick them up he had an image of Mac lying on a metal trolley – his face covered up with a white sheet and his bare feet sticking out at the bottom.
Tuesday morning though, he sat on the edge of his bed, snatched up the shoes and put them on, yanking the laces tight and trying to keep his brain quiet. They pretty much fitted.
He hadn’t been running since school and hadn’t really done it then either, Mr Brazey shouting at them, all red-faced like he thought he was in the army. Stick and Mac sauntering along, having a smoke. He waited until he was on Queen’s Road before he started. It felt wrong, like he couldn’t get one leg in time with the other, but he kept on, listening to his breath scratch at his throat, past the bottom of the park and onto the bridge. He stopped, panting, to look over the low red-brick wall at the trees and the river below. He should be in Spain, sitting on the beach with a beer, listening to Mac chatting shit.
He started running again, turned off the main road and down a shallow hill, along a street of houses that looked like his mum’s, except they had little porches stuck on the front and that bumpy stuff on the walls. Down towards a railway bridge with a long wet stain on the patchy red-and-grey bricks – looked like a giant kept pissing there on his way home from the pub; smelt like it too. On the other side, gravel and stubby grass, and then a road with tall brick walls on both sides, plants and trees crowding over the top.
He kept running. Still wheezing like he smoked fifty a day, not three. Stick gathered up the spit in his mouth and gobbed it at the wall to his right. Why couldn’t Mac have taken the coconuts off, and the grass skirts and the stupid fucking hat? Why did he always have to draw attention to himself? The trainers were starting to rub at his heels, the skin turning hot and sore. Another railway bridge and now an industrial estate – blue security fences, lines of delivery vans. They hadn’t even arrested anyone. Four days and no arrests. A bit in the Manchester Evening News, a bit on the local TV, that was it. Both had used the same picture – Mac with his hood pulled up, grinning. If he’d been a girl there’d have been TV appeals and everyone wringing their hands and saying, ‘Oh, was she raped? Oh, did she suffer? Oh, what a tragedy.’ It was a fucking joke.
Up the hill to his left were the three tower blocks that had got fancied up a few years back. Down where he was: barbed wire, security shutters, window mesh. A sign for bouncy castle hire, another for dog shampooing, another – hand-painted – for car repairs. He spied a path on his right and followed it to the river. It was dirty – bits of toilet paper and rags hanging from the trees either side; a bleached-out crisp packet and a Mars Bar wrapper going in circles. He carried on running along a thin, muddy path by the edge of the river, trees scratching at his arms.
The stitch doubled him up. A tearing pain, sharp in his left side. Couldn’t breathe without it stabbing underneath his skin. He pressed his fingers deep into the muscle of his stomach but it didn’t help. He sucked air in through his teeth, then blew it out again. Felt like he had a bag of nails pushing into his insides. Mac’s trainers were covered in mud. Mac’d be pissed off about that; he was always cleaning his trainers – stopping in the middle of the road to wipe off a bit of dirt.
He was almost in town, near the railway arches, a new lot of flats off to his right. He took slow, cautious steps and tried to breathe deeply. He could see Strangeways’ tower at the top of the hill. Red brick, straight sides, a balcony and then a smaller curved top. Looks like a cock, Mac always said. Get in trouble with the pigs and you’ll end up in the cock. Stick had googled it once at the youth club. It’s suppo
sed to be a ventilation shaft, he’d told Mac, but I reckon it’s for observation. Shaft, Mac had said, shaft – and pissed himself laughing. You could see everything from up there, Stick had said. You’d need binoculars, Mac said, otherwise you’d be so high up everyone would look the same.
It was always the threat at school: you’ll end up in Strangeways if you don’t buck your ideas up, if you don’t stop screwing around, if you don’t sit down and keep schtum and pay attention. Ricky’s dad had been in twice, and his brother.
He tried running again, but the pain was still there, and he was knackered all of a sudden. You need to get some rest, his mum kept saying, you look tired, love. And it was true, he’d not been sleeping, not properly. Every time he closed his eyes he got a picture of Mac in his head – his stomach ripped open. He hadn’t even been stabbed in the stomach. It was his chest, straight into an artery, that’s what everyone was saying – you were fucked if they got an artery. But still, in Stick’s dream-waking it was Mac’s stomach, sliced open and peeled back, his insides raw and red and bleeding.
He started walking, ended up on Cheetham Hill Road next to an offie advertising cheap vodka, and went inside. At the till, he put the bottle on the counter and held the cashier’s gaze, flicking a creased tenner in his right hand. The man just shrugged and served him. Less than three weeks and he’d be eighteen. Except he didn’t want to be eighteen, not without Mac.
Stick walked through the back streets, looking for the river, but he couldn’t quite remember how to get there. The pain had gone. Even when he pressed his fingers into his side he couldn’t bring it back. He thought of his dad, those weeks after Sophie, slumped on the sofa with dead eyes – beer cans all over the carpet. He thought of Mac, lifting a bottle of Red Square to his lips, laughing and coughing as it burnt its way down.
He walked along a road that was a mess of patched tarmac, cobbles showing where bits had worn away, or been ripped up, or whatever it was that happened to tarmac. On the corner with another, smaller road, he stopped by a bit of badly fenced-in wasteland, full of dandelions and purple flowers and rubbish. There was, he saw, a gap below one of the fence panels where a wall had fallen away. It was as good a place to drink as any. He bent double and squeezed in sideways.
The ground was scattered with cracked bits of plastic, half-smashed bricks and piles of what looked like clothes – wet and dirty. A Budweiser bottle, a video tape spewing its reel, a cheap plastic joystick. Stick picked up a belt buckle. The metal was rusted so the prong bit hardly moved. He pushed and pulled it until it snapped off in his hand.
‘Just waltz in and start trashing the place, why don’t you?’
A girl’s voice. Stick turned around, then round again. Couldn’t see anyone. He dropped the buckle.
‘That’s right, litter the place up.’
There was a high, red-brick wall to his left – the remains of a warehouse or something – and there she was, perched on a windowsill, the glass long since gone. He could see the bottoms of a pair of white Converse, jeans, black hair with a streak of pink and two wide dark eyes.
‘You’re trespassing,’ she shouted.
Stick turned away and walked, not towards the road, but further into whatever the place was. Dirty blue carpet tiles had rotted and curled up from slabs of buckled hardwood. Beneath that, rows of neat wooden blocks were laid out in Vs. Some had come loose and he could see little ridges on their sides where they were supposed to fit one into the other.
‘I’m serious.’ She was standing behind him, her thin brown arms folded. She wore a sleeveless puffa jacket and had her top lip pierced with a small silver stud.
‘Go.’ She pointed towards the hole in the fence.
‘You don’t own the place.’ Stick kicked the toe of his right foot against a cracked brick.
‘I’d like you to go.’ She tugged at her fringe – the pink half. ‘Please?’ She stretched the word please a little and lifted the corners of her mouth into a false smile.
Stick looked her up and down. She was almost as skinny as him. No breasts to speak of. No arse to speak of.
‘I said, I’d like you to go.’ She stepped closer and he caught the smell of cigarettes and something sweet.
He turned again and walked away from her, over a pile of bricks and bits of rotten wood and mushed-up who-knew-what. He sat on a lump of concrete and danced one foot up and down, up and down. She was watching him, he could feel it, but he didn’t look over. Opened the vodka instead and took a drink straight from the bottle, like the guys on the street. Washing their troubles away, his mum said. Not much like washing. More like drowning. Hot through his chest. It made you realise you’d got insides. Made you remember there was a tube from your mouth to your cock. He could feel the vodka burn all the way down it. Now his stitch had gone he felt the ache in his legs, his thighs tight and his shins sore. He rolled himself a fag. Then rolled another.
‘You want one?’ he shouted, holding it up.
She didn’t answer.
Stick put the fag in his mouth and flicked his lighter across the end. He tried to blow smoke rings the way Mac did, but he’d never been able to do it.
‘You have to keep your tongue at the back of your mouth.’ She walked round and stood in front of him.
Stick dragged hard on his cigarette and looked at her through narrowed eyes.
She picked up the second fag and held out her hand for the lighter.
‘I’m J,’ she said, once she’d lit up and blown a perfect smoke ring that rose slowly upwards before dissolving into the air. ‘The letter, not the bird.’
‘What’s it stand for?’
‘Itself.’
‘Your parents called you after a letter in the alphabet?’
She blew another smoke ring. ‘Can I have some of that vodka?’
Stick held out the bottle. ‘What? Jennifer? Julie? Jessica? Jody?’
He watched her lift the bottle to her lips and drink without wincing. She had a pointy chin and a dark, bony face. No make-up. Brown freckles across her cheeks. He suspected she always looked pissed off.
‘What’s yours?’ She handed the vodka back.
‘I thought you wanted me to go? I thought I was trespassing.’
‘I decided to like you. What’s your name?’
Stick hesitated for a minute. ‘Kieran.’
J nodded. ‘Nice to meet you, Kieran. Welcome to my –’ she paused and then laughed, a little snort to herself – ‘abode.’
‘What?’
‘Home.’ She swept her arm in a semicircle.
‘This is where you live?’
‘Course it’s not where I live. Come on, I’ll show you the best view.’ She led him to a red armchair which had been pushed against the wall where he’d first seen her – its leather slashed and tagged with black marker-pen scrawls. Stick stood on its back and pulled himself up onto the window ledge next to J.
‘Cool, huh?’ she said. ‘I reckon it was a handbag factory. You can see them.’ She pointed.
Stick looked down over the ruined space. She was right; they were scattered in amongst all the other shit: hundreds of cheap fake-leather bags.
‘They look like dead animals,’ J said. ‘Like they’ve all been killed and are just lying there.’ She took a long swig from the bottle. ‘I’ve seen rats here – big as a cat, one of them was,’ she said. ‘I feel sorry for rats. Everyone thinks they’re evil and all they’re doing is living their lives.’
‘Ugly fuckers though.’
A white van drove past below, techno blasting out of the driver’s window, and they listened until it was out of earshot.
‘Where are you from, anyway?’ Stick said. J frowned. ‘Here.’
‘I mean—’
‘You mean I’m not white.’
‘I just mean—’
‘Dad’s from Ghana. Mum’s from Cheetham Hill.’
‘They together?’
She shrugged. ‘Just about.’ Their knees touched as he reached for the v
odka. When he passed it back, he felt the brush of her hand against his.
Stick looked out at the warehouses with their red-brick walls and triangular roofs. ‘I’m going to Spain,’ he said. ‘With my mate, Mac.’ He swallowed and glanced over at J. She was twisting the vodka cap on and then off and then on again. ‘We’re going to drive,’ he said. ‘Down to Dover, then Calais, through France: Tours, Bordeaux, then Spain: Bilbao, Madrid, Malaga.’
She didn’t ask why they weren’t going to fly; she just passed him the bottle and smiled. She was too skinny, but she had a nice smile.
‘Mac’s got a mate in Malaga with a flat right on the beach. We’re going to stay with him and then find our own place.’ Stick blinked, swallowed again. ‘We’re leaving Saturday.’
J rested her head against the wall. ‘Sounds good,’ she said. ‘Better than Cheetham Hill.’
‘You should come out,’ Stick said without thinking.
She gave him a startled look and then laughed and Stick felt his cheeks burn red. ‘I don’t mean – I just meant—’ He got his tobacco out and rolled two more fags so he didn’t have to look at her.
‘I’m going to live by the sea,’ she said after a while. She took a bit of hair between her finger and thumb and put it into her mouth. ‘I love it. All that space, and everything smells different and tastes different and sounds different. Don’t you think?’ Her hair stuck to her upper lip as she spoke.
He didn’t tell her he’d never been to the sea. He didn’t tell her that Mac was dead. Instead, he twisted his body to the right and leaned forwards to kiss her. She moved faster than you’d think, jutted her fist into his cheekbone. Hard.
‘What the fuck?’ He reared back, put one hand to his face and held the ledge with the other – rough brick against his palm.