“Eh?”
“You heard.”
“Oh, that.”
“That?” asked Jake.
“They’re just good mates,” snapped Barry.
“And you and Roz?” sneered Paul.
“We’re more than that.”
“So Roz is all right then?”
“Of course she is. We’re both all right.” Barry paused and then hit back. “Didn’t he drop you in it?” He sounded malicious.
“What have you heard?” asked Paul. He was suddenly alarmed, no longer the mocking cynic.
“Just stuff about a car.”
“That all?”
“What happened?” asked Jake.
“Nothing,” said Paul, opening the whisky bottle again and drinking deeply.
“OK.” Barry gave up and swapped to an easier victim. “Someone told me Joe dumped you in the lake, Jake.” He laughed at the rhyme and began to chant childishly: “Jake’s been dumped in the lake, mate. Jake’s been dumped in the lake, mate.”
Paul joined in and they chanted together.
“Jake’s been dumped in the lake, mate. Jake’s been –”
“Shut up,” yelled Jake. He was leaning forward, glaring at them in hatred, the tendons in the side of his neck like whip cords. “Just shut up!”
The stopped, gazing at him thoughtfully.
“That was another wind-up, was it?” asked Barry. “Just another silly rumour.”
“Must be.” Jake laughed too heartily, trying to pretend his outburst hadn’t happened. “Unless it was that time we were mucking about.”
“Mucking about? Where?” Paul took another swig from the whisky bottle and didn’t attempt to pass it round.
“By the lake. We were trying to push each other in.”
“Joe won, did he?” asked Barry thoughtfully.
“We both did,” said Jake wildly.
“What do you mean?”
“We both fell in.”
“That’s not what I heard,” said Paul.
“Heard from who?”
“Never mind.” Paul was deeply slurred now.
“Or maybe you didn’t hear anything,” said Barry.
That’s unusual, thought Jake, trying to keep control. Barry doesn’t usually come to my rescue.
“What else do we know?” asked Paul.
“What about?”
“What Joe did to us.”
“Joe didn’t do anything,” snapped Jake. “You know he didn’t.” The control he had fought for seemed to be sliding away again.
Paul nodded and took another swig.
“Watch it,” yelled Barry. “That bottle’s almost empty.”
“Want some?”
“OK. But be careful. You’re rat-arsed. Don’t drop it.”
Paul passed the bottle shakily to Barry who took a large gulp, almost draining it, then passed the whisky on to Jake who simply said, “No thanks.”
“Piss-artist,” slurred Paul.
“What do you mean?” Jake was genuinely surprised.
“I mean what I say. Little precious prick. Doesn’t like to get pissed.”
“I don’t,” said Jake firmly.
“In case you say the wrong thing. Like the truth.”
“Knock it off, Paul,” said Barry. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“But I do. My mum always says ‘In vino Veritas’.”
“What’s that meant to mean?”
“It’s Latin.”
“What’s it mean?”
“In wine there is truth.”
“You’re drinking Scotch.” Barry was grinning fatuously.
“It doesn’t matter.” Paul gave a long low belch. “I guess we’re all too shit-scared to tell the real truth about Joe anyway.”
“The truth?” mumbled Jake and then wished he hadn’t spoken.
“The truth is Joe turned out to be a bastard,” Paul slurred.
“Shut up!” said Barry. Now it was his turn to get wound up.
“A bastard.”
“I said, shut up!”
“We’ve had enough,” said Jake. He knew he had to intervene now.
“What of? Scotch?”
“Of you. Go to bed. We should all go to bed.”
“You’re just scared of the truth.” Paul suddenly lurched to his feet. “You’re scared of the truth about Joe. Both of you.” He staggered again and would have pitched forward into the fire had Barry not grabbed and somehow steadied him.
“You raving idiot,” yelled Jake almost hysterically.
“That’s right.” Paul belched again, leaning heavily on Barry. “I’m a raving idiot for not telling the truth about Joe. Now I want to piss and get some kip. In that order.”
Barry turned to Jake. “I’ll see he’s OK. You stamp out the fire.”
The sparks rose, each like a star, soaring up into the night. Joe was a star, thought Jake. Once.
“Piss on it,” advised Paul’s drunken voice from the bivouac. “That’s the only sure way of getting a fire out.” He was only just intelligible, and Jake heard Barry telling him to shut up yet again.
But when Jake eventually joined the others in their cramped shelter he saw they were wide awake, staring up at the thatch of leaves.
Even Paul seemed to have sobered up when he asked, “Where’s the torch?”
“I’ve got it,” said Barry. “It’s quite safe.” He sounded rock solid, almost maternal. “You OK, Jake?”
“I’m OK.” He slid into last year’s leaf-mulch, discovered he was lying on tree roots and turned on his side, trying to get comfortable, hearing Barry making a low muttering sound.
“What you on about?” grumbled Paul childishly.
“I’m saying my prayers.”
“Oh.” Paul seemed embarrassed, but Jake, turning on to his back again, felt comforted. Suddenly the tree roots didn’t seem so hard and unyielding.
Paul glanced round and saw Barry and Jake were asleep. We never spoke the truth, he thought muzzily, remembering the car as it turned over, the flashing blue lights racing towards them, Joe yelling at him to get out when he bloody well knew he couldn’t.
Why had Joe betrayed him? That wasn’t like him; and why hadn’t he told the others? But then none of them had even begun to tell the truth about Joe. Why were they all so chicken? Joe had been important to them all. But to Paul, Joe had been family.
Barry finished his prayers, including Joe in them as he always did and wondering why. Was it a habit? Were all his prayers just habit? Then he remembered the terrible words he had uttered in Christ the King and felt drunkenly ashamed. He had to pray again, to make up a special prayer about Joe, to cancel out the curse. Why in God’s name hadn’t he done it before? In God’s name? Maybe he should pray to the Virgin Mary instead. Or was he simply substituting one benign figure for another? Who were they? Figures in an illustrated bible? Plaster saints? He had prayed to them all his life, but he still didn’t know who they really were. Shutting his eyes against the dreadful uncertainty, Barry prayed as the old priest Father Peter had instructed him.
“Say ten Hail Marys, Barry. That’ll be just the ticket.”
So Barry prayed as he had always prayed. “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Hail Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now, and at the hour of our death. Amen.” Sinner? He was surely that. “Keep Joe safe,” he continued. “Please keep Joe safe.”
He saw himself kneeling with Father Peter at the feet of the Virgin Mary.
“Keep Joe safe.” He repeated the litany like a child. “Please, Mary, Mother of God, keep Joe safe.” Holy Mother, he had used that phrase as a swear word too many times. What chance did he have? What chance did Joe have?
No one had told the truth about Joe, Barry thought, but maybe he could understand why. No one had wanted to admit that Joe had gone as bad as rotten fruit and for a moment Barry saw an apple on a plate, crammed with st
ruggling maggots, the skin black and soft and evil-smelling, being eaten away from the inside. From the heart.
Roz was sitting at a table in the ice-cream parlour, gazing down at the apple, a knife in her hand, and as he drifted off to sleep he dreamt that she was cutting at a maggot-writhing section of the apple and slipping it into her mouth.
Mercifully Barry struggled awake, soaked in sweat, only to find Paul snoring beside him – and Jake as wide awake as he, the thunder rumbling again, drawing ever nearer.
“Can’t you sleep?”
“No,” said Jake.
“We didn’t speak the truth about Joe.”
“I didn’t want to.”
“He was great once.”
“Yes.”
“Good guy.”
“That’s right.”
“Then he went rotten,” muttered Barry. “Didn’t he?”
“I don’t know,” said Jake weakly. “I don’t know anything.”
Barry thought of Roz again and, his prayers forgotten, a yawning chasm of rage and grief opened up yet again.
Paul woke and stared into the darkness through the latticed wood. The night was hot and sultry and thunder was rumbling. The moonlight seemed bright and he saw Joe walking across the glade, grinning, his long hair flapping in the night breeze.
Then Paul woke again, properly this time, realizing he’d been dreaming. His head hurt, his mouth was dry and he longed for the bottle of water in his rucksack which he had been using as a pillow.
By squirming about, he managed to drag the bottle out, unscrew the top and put it to his lips, letting the warm liquid glug down his throat in the most remarkably soothing way.
Paul lay awake, refreshed but completely unable to sleep, his head clearing a little but another kind of pain returning that made him deeply depressed. He’d had a family. Now his family had been taken away.
He reached for the whisky bottle that he had noticed Barry tuck away under a mulch of last year’s leaves. Taking care not to wake him, Paul managed to retrieve the bottle and put it to his lips. There was a little left, enough to be at least temporarily comforting.
Part Five
Paul
Of course they’d been stupid to go joy-riding. They had been even more stupid to drink and Paul was sure that Joe had taken something else. He had never known him to take drugs before and was trying to work out what he’d used. Crack? There was a lot of it about in the town, even at school, and the stuff wouldn’t have been hard for Joe to find. There had been something particularly wild and destructive about him that evening, about ten days ago now, not long before he disappeared. It was as if he could no longer find any highs and had had to resort to creating them artificially.
Paul and Joe had always been close, recognizing a need in each other, a need for excitement in a dull world. Because of a dull world. Although some of this need was fulfilled in the sports they played, the rules made them too safe. Joe and Paul didn’t like rules.
Paul was the only child of a single mother, and despite his skinhead, street-wise, macho image, he adored her to such an extent that deep inside he had already begun to worry. He wondered if she felt the same, for she was always encouraging him to go out, to have a good time, to “go over to Joe’s”. Not that she ever went anywhere herself.
The old Victorian house, now converted into flats, had an extensive back garden in which no other tenants showed any interest, and Laura, as Paul had called his mother for the last few years, spent all her time gardening when she wasn’t working for a local estate agent. As a result she had transformed the wilderness into a secret garden that even Paul had come to view with wonder.
She had gradually cut back the tangled undergrowth and rigorously pruned the canopy of trees, erecting a rust-coloured wrought iron gate into each small clearing, the close-cut lawns surrounded by green plants of every shape, texture and size, punctuated here and there with a stab of purple foxglove or a deep-pink old-fashioned rose. A series of ponds, water trickling from one to the next, ran down one side, edged by a rockery of red Devon stone Laura had rescued, piece by piece, from the garden of a house that had been demolished down the road.
She loved to work there on summer evenings after they had had supper together, and occasionally Paul would help her. Their secret garden, their secret life was closely guarded, even from Joe. Paul was careful that no one should know about his much-loved central core. Everyone, except Laura, must see him as hard, cool, laid-back. Just like Joe, or at least how Joe liked to see himself.
Paul had always seen Joe as someone he could look up to and he knew that Jake and Barry felt much the same. They had all seen him as their natural leader – until recently. Joe’s mother worked in a newsagents, and to Paul she was a smart, bright, warm-hearted woman whose husband had gone out of his way to make Paul feel at home. Not that Joe’s mother hadn’t. He had felt close to Debbie too and was always included on family outings.
Paul remembered one occasion in particular when the five of them had gone down to Camber Sands and played cricket on the beach, the incoming tide lapping at their feet, the ball inevitably being hit out into the sea. But it had been such a thrill to retrieve it.
Later they had clambered up on a jetty beside Rye Harbour, backing away from the silky foam as the weed-covered structure was gradually covered by the tide. As the sunset began to flame across the sky and long fingers of shadow had crept across the sand, Joe’s parents, Katie and Brian Repton, had walked arm in arm back towards the car park while Joe and Debbie and Paul had run along in the water, splashing each other. Thoroughly soaked and worn out, Joe had asked Paul, “Can being happy last?” He suddenly sounded young and lost. His eyes were fixed on his parents.
“Of course it can,” Debbie had said.
“I’m asking Paul.”
“Of course it can,” Paul had repeated.
Joe had looked somehow disappointed in him and had then raced on, the water cascading around him, his tanned body glistening.
“What’s he on about?” Paul had asked.
Debbie had shrugged and he had been suspicious, feeling left out.
“Come on –”
“It’s nothing.”
“What’s nothing?”
“It’s just that Mum and Dad haven’t been getting on so well lately. Again.”
Of course Paul knew that there had been a few problems, but surely only a few? Joe had never mentioned anything, but Debbie often confided in Paul as if she had no one else to talk to.
“Joe won’t listen,” she had once told Paul. “He pretends nothing’s happening.”
Paul never liked to talk to Joe about what or what not might be happening, but he guessed his perfect family wasn’t so perfect after all and they had both papered over the cracks.
Now, as they walked on the shore, Debbie had said, “Dad’s been going missing again.”
“Where’s he been?”
“With someone.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“Mum’s forgiven him.”
“What about you?”
“I don’t know.” Debbie never committed herself. She just reported the facts to him. Maybe that was enough, Paul often thought.
“And Joe?”
“He doesn’t say.”
“Anything?”
“Nothing at all. But we’re all happy.” Debbie was suddenly doing what Joe would have wanted her to do. She paused and then went on hurriedly. “Basically. A happy family.”
“Of course you are.”
That was what Paul and Debbie had always said to each other. It was a formula. A way out. They were supporting Joe.
Despite all this, or maybe because of it, Paul knew that Joe’s relationship with his father was very close.
Brian Repton had been a professional footballer when he was a young man, and lavished great attention on Joe’s sporting prowess, coaching him as much as he could, “bringing Joe on”, as he put it. As a result, his son had been tipped to be selected
by the county. Father and son also ran together, more like coach and pupil than father and son. It was as if Joe’s father was compensating, pouring into Joe every talent he had ever possessed before something happened.
But the absences were disruptive and Paul always heard about them because Debbie needed to confide in him. Nevertheless, she would always end up with the formula. “But we’re all happy. Basically. A happy family.”
“Of course you are,” Paul always replied.
He sometimes saw Joe in a storm-wrecked ship, sitting in his cabin, staring out of the porthole while the vessel wallowed in heavy seas without rudder or sails.
The image seemed to bore itself into Paul’s mind to such an extent that he began to dream about a mastless ship drifting on a blue horizon, becalmed on a glassy sea that was alive with floating weed-creatures. He could see his face through the porthole and sometimes watched Joe walking on deck, looking about him, waiting for rescue. Several times, Paul saw Joe pick up a pair of binoculars, scanning the listless ocean. “Where are you, Dad?” he cried out. “I can’t see you anywhere.”
All this was a long way from the precious but increasingly unsettling secret life Paul shared with his mother in their paradise garden.
He could hardly believe that Laura had made such a unique place by the labour of her own hands, but at the same time he was concerned that his friends might see her creation and assume he was “different” or “some kind of poof”. No one else’s mother behaved like this, so he both adored and was ashamed of her. She was his own personal secret, and to guard his secret, Paul never invited any of his friends home – even Joe.
Laura, a natural recluse, never seemed to need company. Socializing at work was enough for her and Paul and the garden absorbed all her attention. Recently she had been restoring the old conservatory which was already gleaming with a fresh coat of white paint. The glass had been cleaned and polished while inside she had begun to grow exotic tropical plants.
Over the last few months, however, Paul had also had some other disturbing dreams, this time about himself, as the conservatory turned into a glass palace with strange luminous colours shining from each window. At the very top, high in a glass turret, sat his mother spinning at a loom, her long, dark hair flowing down, inviting him to climb.
Finding Joe Page 7