And then a shiver went through him, but a good one that made him feel full of himself, pushing the fear out of him, out of his chest and into the tunnel. And he smiled, he really did smile, when he remembered that he had another weapon, better than any penknife.
It threw them when he knelt down, kept them back just long enough for Bully to say, “Here! Jack! Here, girl! OUT!” And she couldn’t wait to get out! And when they saw that dog with a head full of shark’s teeth, blood bubbling between her ears, they were breathing in Bully’s fear. He could almost see it, like it was a mist.
“Back off!” said Bully. “Back off. You’re not getting nothing!” And they did, they backed away, swearing and threatening, but they did back away up the steps.
The train whistled in. Bully jumped on with Jack. The boys heard the doors beeping and ran for the exit, back up to the street for a signal for their phones to tell the rest of the gang he was travelling back the way he’d come.
That was their mistake, because Bully did a brave thing, his head telling him this was the best thing to do but his heart having nothing to do with it. He went and jumped off the train as soon as their ankles were starting to disappear up the steps.
Never get predictable.
So, he was being unpredictable now. Not doing what he wanted to do, which was get on this train. He looked up at the information board and saw it change and lose a minute of his life, of his ticket’s life, as he thought about what to do next.
He took a long time getting out of the station, willing himself to leave. He was confused and couldn’t understand how they were getting ahead of him, waiting for him now, not even chasing along after him. And then when he’d got safely away from the tube station, he did a little angry dance. He’d told the Sammies he was going north, to Camelot, hadn’t he? So they knew where he was going, they were taking short cuts, getting ahead of the game like the wolf in the fairy tale.
He blinked. His eyes were stinging with the salt that had dried and crusted into the corners. He spat on his fingers and rubbed them until they itched. Then he rubbed them some more. He knew it made it worse but he carried on doing it. He got his compass out. A little bubble of air trapped inside came to the surface of the glass as he watched the arrow inside slowly turn to find its way.
He stopped walking. And he really thought about what he was doing, about the boys and men now maybe further up the road, higher up, waiting for him, and he tried to think how they would think. Getting to know his enemy. They would be expecting him, just like a kid, to carry on up the road, carry on heading to Camelot to get his money. Then he had a moment of clarity, how to turn this thing on its head and let them spend all night chasing his shadow while he stayed put until the morning. It would lose him time but he might get to keep his ticket.
He left the main road through the town and crossed a park. He needed a place indoors: a place that never closed, where you didn’t have to buy anything. Somewhere they let anybody in, even someone like him without any shoes.
He found this sort of place on a quiet road. It was called the Royal Free Hospital. Well, that sounded good to him, and though it didn’t look anything like Buckingham Palace it was definitely free. The sign said so. Also, he might find someone to cash in his ticket for him. Someone old or, better still, on their way out, who didn’t have much time left, like him. Because three days was all he had now.
They didn’t let you take dogs into hospital though. There wasn’t a sign but he just had this feeling, so he kept Jack in the rucksack and told her to be quiet and walked on in through the revolving doors, pushing too hard and having to wait for them to catch up and let him through. He walked past two nurses dealing with people just walking in like him who didn’t seem any more hurt than he was.
He went to the café place. It was closed up on a Sunday night, and the shutters were down. There was a vending machine along the corridor but he’d dropped his change on the hill. He looked up and down the white hallway. And then quickly, with his rucksack hiding what he was doing, he bent down and put his arm in through the slot and shoved it up as high as he could but he couldn’t quite reach the chocolate.
When he pulled his hand back out, it was stuck on the metal lip of the lid. He yanked it but it only hurt more, and in frustration, he barged the machine. The alarm went off, his arm came out grazed and bleeding.
He took the stairs to get away, passing a doctor coming down, who saw his empty feet but carried on going. No one seemed bothered that he had no shoes in here. He understood why on the next floor when he pushed through some double doors and an old lady in bare feet with a balloon full of water shuffled towards him. Even though the corridor was plenty wide enough he got out the way. She looked like she had her bed dress on back to front, and he was horrified when he saw her bare old bum following along after her.
He decided to go up another floor. And when he came out of the doors there was a trolley with a few empty dinner plates waiting to be taken down in the lift. He picked out a spud and a sausage. He forced himself to feed the sausage to Jack and wondered if there was more where that came from. He went to the end of the corridor to take a look.
Blarrr, blarrr, blarrr!
His head filled up with an alarm much worse than the little shriek, shriek of the vending machine and he assumed he’d set it off, whatever it was, by nicking half a sausage. He put his hands to his ears to keep any more of the blarrr, blarrr from getting in while he tried to run away from it.
Then nurses started leaping out of rooms and coming down corridors as if they’d been hiding there all day, just waiting for this. But they ran past him and he heard them yelling “Crash! Crash! Crash!” and he saw it was nothing to do with him.
Two doctors were coming now, pushing a heart start trolley really fast towards him. To avoid them he went round the corner, spied a door with a little window and, thinking it was a store cupboard, he was already in it before he saw the man in the bed.
“Now where have you been?” An old Davey was lying on the bed, staring right at him. “Now where have you been?” He said it again like he was asking him and not giving him a telling-off. Bully just stood there, not wanting to say.
“Come in then, come in.” He waved his withery hand. He looked as good as dead but then all Daveys did.
“Shut the door, shut the door. On your back, the thing … the thing, that bag on your back. With the sack,” he said, still waving his arm, the skin hanging down and flipping about like it might slip off his bone. “That’s a rucksack! Now where have you been?”
“The zoo,” Bully said because that had been the best part of his day so far.
“Oh, the zoo…” The old man’s face relaxed, like he’d taken a big swig of something good. “What did you see?”
Bully looked round again, checking the door. The nurses and doctors were still shouting at each other.
“Now where have you been?”
“I said. The zoo.”
Jack began to whimper, the bit of sausage had started up her guts because it was well gone her teatime.
“Shh,” said Bully.
“What’s that? What have you got there, in your sack? A penguin? What is it that you’ve got there?”
Bully sniggered. “Nah!” he said. “It’s a dog.”
Bully wasn’t scared of this Davey, even if he was dying, saying things like did he have a penguin in his bag.
“Oh. A dog.” The man’s face lit up and his eyes stopped wandering. And instead of asking if it was his dog, he said, “Well, let’s have a look at him then! Get him out, get him out.”
Bully put the rucksack on the ground and got Jack out. He winced with the pain, the skin raw on his hips.
“Oh, is that a Staffy?” said the Davey and now it was Bully’s turn to smile because this Davey knew at least one thing about dogs.
“Yeah, yeah. She’s a Staff cross. She’s crossed with something really good, a real proper breed with a pedigree and everything.”
“Oh, what d
oes that matter? What’s her name? That’s all that matters. Having a good name. That’s all that matters. What’s her name?”
“Jack. She’s Jack.”
“Oh… Jack! That is a good name. I know someone called Jack. Who is it?” he said.
He was mad, this Davey, but he was all right, Bully decided, as long as he stayed where he was. Bully sniffed the tray at the end of the bed and the man caught him looking as he hoped he would.
“Are you hungry?”
“Yeah.”
The man looked around the little room helplessly. “Sometimes they leave things to eat.”
“That.” Bully pointed to the dinner.
“Oh, what is it?”
“Food.”
“Oh, yes, you can eat that.”
Bully took the lid off and it was shepherd’s pie. His mum used to make it and Phil used to say it had real shepherd in it to put him off.
He took a big spoonful and then another two and then put the plate on the floor for Jack to finish.
“Finish it all, finish it all,” said the Davey when he saw Bully looking at the custard dessert. Bully finished it and pocketed the metal spoon because he had lost that too in his coat, along with the last little bit of his mum in the card.
“I’m private and this is my room with a view,” the Davey said and pointed to the window. The darkness outside was beginning to reflect the light back into the room and Bully could see nothing out there, just the road and a few trees.
He checked the door again, put his face right up to the glass. Things were getting calmer now, one of the nurses shaking her head, another one nodding. He looked at the old man. He thought he would be polite and ask how long he’d been here and what was wrong with him, like you did when you came to visit people in hospital.
“You been here long?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I don’t know. Do you?” he asked hopefully.
Bully shrugged. “You had a bit of a kickin’ or sumin’?”
“No, no,” said the man and Bully nodded because his face didn’t look too bad, not bashed about. Just those spiders up his nose, and red and blue lines all over his cheeks, like a little kid had been colouring him in while he was asleep.
“I’m going home tomorrow.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes. I’m going home…”
“You ever been to Watford, mate?” The question came out before he thought about it.
“Oh, Watford. I don’t know. I’d love to go.”
“You got a car then?”
“Oh, yes. I do. I’m sure I have. I have a car somewhere out there. A silver one,” he said and it reminded Bully of the men who’d been following him. A car was good news. A car was luxury. A car was a flat on wheels; somewhere to sleep, to eat, somewhere to get you someplace. Back on his estate you had to wait to go anywhere, for a bus or a lift into town. A car would get him out of here straight away.
Bully took a big breath. “Could you do me a favour, mate?”
“What? What?”
“I’ve got this ticket, yeah?”
“A ticket? Yes?” He was staring at Bully but as if he were further back in the room.
“Yeah, but I need someone to collect on it. It’s a secret though. And gangstas are trying to rob me. I bought it for my mum and she gave it back to me for my birthday because she was dying.” He thought it best to get that straight. “But I’m too young to play, so it’s got to be someone older than me who has to go and get the money from Camelot in Watford. And then you go and give it back to me. It’s got to be that way. I’ll give you some of it but you’d have to give me all of it first, you get me?”
“What?”
“The money,” said Bully. “What I won.”
“Bit of luck on the gee-gees?”
“The what? No.” This guy wasn’t understanding straight. So Bully told him a bit more of the story, filled him in so that it sounded like something believable, something real instead of just a story a kid with a dog was telling him to cheer him up in hospital. It took a while with the bloke nodding him along, then pointing out the window, going on about his private view of the darkening road and the trees.
Finally Bully stopped talking. He could see the Davey was thinking it over. Bully had decided he wasn’t going to give him anything like half. He could have half a million instead. That would do him for what he had left to live.
He checked the little window in the door. No one was rushing about any more. And when he squinted sideways there was just one nurse over at the desk.
He looked back. Jack was up on the bed and the old man was patting her and crying, his eyes like little yellow fried eggs. That frightened Bully because he was smiling at the same time. He picked up the rucksack, nervous and wanting to get when this Davey was going to take him to Watford sorted out.
The man looked at him and stopped crying. He didn’t rub his face dry but instead just looked surprised.
“Now where have you been?” he asked in the same voice as he’d done a Scooby-Doo ago.
Bully was going to sleep in the hospital but a security guard found him on the stairs and started asking him why he was there. And by the time he got out of the hospital the sky was more black than blue.
He didn’t feel safe out in the open any more among the late-night dog walkers, dogs off the lead and sniffing round his rucksack. So when he came to a high wall, he went over it. The top had spikes curling above it like old, dead fingers but he just grabbed them and heaved himself over. Even with the rucksack on it wasn’t hard because he was mostly skin and bone.
The first thing he saw was a lump of stone stuck in the ground, and another, and another, with angels poking out all over the place. He was in a grave place, a cemetery. And this, he thought, was a good place to hide out – just like the hospital, anyone could go there but nobody really wanted to. He felt like running back and telling the Davey in the hospital that this was where he was going to end up; that this was going to be his view very soon. He wanted to get back at him for what he’d done, getting Bully’s hopes up, playing tricks, making promises he didn’t know how to keep.
He took Jack out of the rucksack, left it by a gravestone, and they went for a walk. Bully kept to the big wide paths and he stopped every so often to touch a name carved into a stone. As he wandered around in that last bit of extra light you got in summer time, he cheered himself up thinking that the people looking for him wouldn’t be happy either.
They went past a few stone coffins that were empty, with their lid half off or smashed, like someone inside had had enough of being stuck in there. As he walked he kept sniffing, night green smells and old water sneaking in past his cold. And then he felt his feet getting colder and he looked down and saw he was walking on gravestones: a whole path of them leading off into the black green of bushes and trees.
He shivered, jumped back onto the grass and started seriously thinking about where he was going to sleep. There must be a toilet, some place somewhere. But when he tried to go back to the main path he was lost.
He got his compass out but that was no good because he hadn’t checked which direction he’d been heading when he came over the wall. And as the bushes and the darkness thickened up around him, he thought he saw what looked like a little old-fashioned street full of little old pointy houses. But as he got closer he saw that these houses weren’t for living in. No one had ever lived in them. They were for being dead in. And their huge iron and stone doors had only ever opened and closed once or twice for those inside. And now he was in among them, he saw they weren’t so little. They loomed above him, carving off that last little bit of light from the summer sky.
He stopped walking, saw a tunnel of these tombs winding into the darkness. He wasn’t going any further down there…
And then that last speck of light in the sky was gone. And though the stars were out, they didn’t shine this far down. He flicked his lighter on, but the darkness was still there, pushing up against him inside
his little bubble of light.
He tried very hard not to look right and left, not to swing the lighter about, but when he did he caught more of the angels, the bad ones between the trees, dragging little kids to heaven. Another one pointing him out with white fingers, as if to say: He’s the one! He’s the one with the winning ticket! And there were more of them at his feet. Kipping just off the path, trying to trip him up!
“Where’s the wall, mate? Where we going?” But Jack didn’t seem to know either, she just whined like she was scared. And Bully had to listen to the sound of his own feet hurrying after them as he went down one path then another, his head going right and left until he stopped looking where he was going, and that was when he ran and tripped right in front of the hound crouched ready and waiting to rip his throat out.
“Hurrgh,” he said, scrabbling back to his feet. But when the dog didn’t go for him, didn’t pounce – didn’t even breathe – he reached out and touched it.
It was cold, stone cold, and part of a gravestone. And it wasn’t waiting to rip his throat out but resting with its head between its paws, forever looking out for the poor bloke six feet under the ground. And he couldn’t help being impressed. He didn’t know you could put a whole dog on your grave. He wouldn’t mind getting one of those for his gravestone when he’d spent his millions and he was dead, because he didn’t want to end up like his mum as just ashes in a sweetie jar, dumped in a bin.
Then he heard an extra big noise like something extra big coming at him and he yelled and he was off, frantically clicking the flint on his lighter, click, click, click.
They came out over a different wall onto a lane on a hill. And he ran straight over to the nearest streetlamp to get his breath back. When he did, he found he was very thirsty because he hadn’t taken any water at the hospital.
He walked on up the lane past a blue van that he gave the once over, considering breaking into it. Highgate Plumbing and Solar it said on the side. At the next row of houses he went looking in the back gardens for a water tap and maybe a shed to spend what was left of his night. He went from garden to garden, catching sight of someone in front of the TV, a long, long way away.
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