I mean they must have looked, right? They aren’t going to miss something that obvious, and they aren’t going to want me to ask them about it, are they? Like I can tell them how to do their job. But on the other hand, Nai was out cold when they found her, and has been ever since. She couldn’t tell them if her wrist was hurting. I find my hand reaching out to take hers, but I stop myself.
This was the thing with me and Nai, we hung out a lot.
That was why, after she disappeared, the police asked us if they could look at our phones and laptops and trolled right through them to see if there were any clues to where she had gone. I told them, if I knew anything, I’d fucking tell them, but they said it was better to look, so we let them. There was nothing there to say we knew where Nai had gone, because we didn’t know.
The police thought I had to know everything about her, because that’s what people said, her family, her friends. Even my mum. They said if anyone knew where Nai was, it would be me. Because we liked the same things, we made each other laugh. We finished each other’s sentences. They thought there was something going on between me and Nai. Because we’d written most of Mirror, Mirror’s songs together, and a lot of them were love songs.
But we were never writing those songs about each other.
Nai never asked me who I was thinking about when I came up with those lyrics, and I never asked her. It was understood that we were both into someone who wasn’t available. One of the things we liked about each other was that we didn’t need to know each other’s secrets. We just needed to know each other. If anything she was the only girl I was ever around that I didn’t think about what it would be like to kiss. That just isn’t us.
Now, as I sit here and want to take her hand, I hesitate. Once I would have held her hand and not cared what anyone said, because me and Nai knew what we were. Now, though, I don’t know who else has held her, or hurt her. Now she is a stranger, and it’s only now that she is back that I really, really miss her.
Very carefully, in case it could hurt her, I lace my fingers through hers. Her skin is warm, I can feel the steady beat of her pulse against my wrist. Glancing at Leo and Rose, I see they are still lost in their screens, so gently, very gently I lift her hand to my mouth, and whisper into her skin, ‘Come back, Nai, OK? Come back, I need you.’
And that’s when I see it. Just a glimpse at first, like a crescent moon. It hadn’t been visible before but suddenly there it was, fresh and new. Stark and bold.
‘Fuck,’ I say out loud, and Rose and Leo look at me.
‘What?’ Rose comes over.
‘A tattoo,’ I tell them. ‘While she was gone, Naomi got a tattoo.’
8
This is the thing about tattoos. I have three of them that no one but me knows about. Not even Rose and Leo. Not even Nai. I guess there will come a moment when it comes out and there will be more shouting and disappointment, but it hasn’t yet, which is one of the upsides of your parents basically ignoring you.
I’m too young to have them legally, but the first one I had was a stick and poke tattoo, which I did myself with a needle and a pot of ink. I watched this video on YouTube and did it to myself, on the sole of my foot, under the arch. It hurt like a mother-fucker, and it’s really shit.
It’s supposed to be the infinity symbol, but it looks more like a pissed number eight. I don’t even know why I did it, except it was something to do and I liked the pain. On that day I was hurting already, like my whole body was a bruise, inside and out. I wanted to feel something else apart from the stone-heavy pain in my chest.
I got my second tattoo on the same day that I had half my head shaved. I didn’t know I was going to do it, except that I had this idea of what I looked like in my head and while my body was changing to the way I wanted it, my ‘look’ wasn’t.
Then I woke up one morning and thought, what about that is right or fair? My body’s been through so much, and no one, no one cared. But if I get a piercing, or cut my hair it’s world war three. Fuck that, I thought. If there is one thing I should be allowed to control in my life it’s what I look like.
When my hair was gone, I stared at my reflection and I felt . . . well, I felt like we’d only just met. I didn’t want to go home yet. I wanted a bit of time to just be me, to put off getting the grief I knew was coming, for not being the nice middle-class clean-cut kid that my parents want me to be. So I stopped outside this tattoo place and looked at the designs. I had money saved from working Saturdays in the supermarket, enough to get a pretty good one. And I thought what the hell, I look about eleven, they are bound to throw me out.
Maybe it was the new haircut. But they didn’t ask me for ID and they didn’t throw me out. This massive dude with a long grey beard that came down to his waist just gave me book after book of designs and waited. And I saw this Hammerhead Shark, made up of tribal symbols, and I said to the bloke, what does this mean?
‘It’s a symbol of strength, the protector, the warrior.’ He said. ‘The kind of person who’d do anything for the people they love.’
‘I want that one,’ I said, a blush creeping over my face as I realised there really was only one place I could get it and not have a chance of it being spotted. ‘On my butt.’
He looked at me for a long moment, and I am pretty sure he was wondering what about this shaven-headed ginger git looked even a little like a warrior protector, but he shrugged and said, ‘It’ll hurt there.’
‘I can take it,’ I’d replied.
‘It’s your skin, mate.’
He wasn’t lying. It fucking, fucking hurt. I felt the gun vibrating like it was in my bones, my skin screaming, nerves twisting and jangling with every pinprick, stretching out for what seemed like hours, until eventually I kind of rolled into the pain and it became part of every breath I took. When he finally stopped and put the needle down, I peeled myself off the table, and went to the mirror. The colours of the shark came alive as I looked at them, blues and greens flexing and flowing on my skin and muscle, and this sensation of warmth and peace spread through me, and I felt good about myself. I felt relaxed about who I was and comfortable in my colourful, ink-stained skin. And that’s when I knew I had done the right thing, because showing your true colours is always the right thing. It has to be.
Sure, it hurt for ages, days after, but I didn’t care. I liked it. I liked the pain, and I liked my shark, even when I couldn’t see it, because I knew it was there and it meant that no one really knew me, not even the people I am closest to, and I liked that.
The last one, I got under my arm, by my heart. Just after Nai had gone and the pain was so bad, I needed something to cancel it out. The ache of the last tattoo was only just fading and I realised that I missed the distraction of it, so I went back again and the guy with the beard inked me good. It’s a wave breaking on rocks, water moving, reforming, changing, gathering strength. I’m a wave, I thought: even when I’m breaking I’m strong.
I remember wanting to tell Nai about it, because I thought that was a good lyric, but she wasn’t there to tell. She was in that place where this happened to her.
This tattoo.
And that’s what freaks me out.
Naomi would never have a tattoo. She hated them.
We used to watch Tattoo Fixers together and all she would do is harp on about what kind of prick gets pissed and then gets a prick tattooed on them, and how gross they would look when your skin was old and saggy. She said they were about vanity and lack of identity.
The girl I hung out with the day before she vanished in her bright yellow dress and bare feet would never have had a tattoo. Not in a million years.
‘Fuck.’ Rose kneels next to me and peers at the strange pattern, inked in dark blue.
‘Shit,’ Leo says, standing behind us. It’s a semi-circle, quite small, no bigger than a fifty pence piece, filled with a finely lined abstract pattern that seems to make no sense. Curves, right angles, dots and dashes, layers and layers of meaningless detail that make it
look almost solid, until you really start to look at it, and then when you really do, you see faces, animals, depths and shadows. Blink and it all disappears.
‘Whoever did this, it took skill to do it with this much detail in such a small area. It’s all carefully defined, no bleeding ink. This wasn’t something she did to herself, or had done in a squat somewhere. This is professional. We need to tell the police,’ I say.
‘How the fuck do you know so much about tattoos all of a sudden?’ Leo says. ‘And fuck telling the pigs! What difference does it make?’
‘Because she didn’t have it when she left and now she does. It happened while she was missing. Maybe they can trace where it was done? Find out who she was with, how she paid for it . . .’ I look at Rose. ‘We have to, right?’
She nods and Leo shakes his head.
‘Why are you so touchy about it?’ Rose asks him, and he drops his gaze.
‘I’m not touchy about it, it’s just . . . it was bad for me after she ran away or have you forgotten? I don’t want them around me again, especially not now.’
He isn’t lying. When the police know you live on Leo’s estate, they pretty much assume you are guilty right from the get go. There are plenty of good people that live there, people like Leo and his mum, but it’s not them that people hear about, it’s the criminals, the drug dealers and gangs. The minute they found out that Naomi was friends with a boy who lived there, a boy whose older brother was inside for aggravated assault, the police were all over Leo, right up in his business. They spent much longer with him than the rest of us; even though they took all our phones and laptops to look at, it was Leo’s they kept for the longest. They asked him about everything, from the porn on his browser to the assault charges his brother went away for. It hit him hard, made him angry, and the little bit of trust he had left in them was gone.
We can’t blame him for wanting to be as far away from anyone in a uniform as possible.
‘I guess we could just not get the police involved,’ I say, wavering.
‘We have to.’ Rose steps in, shrugging at Leo. ‘This is evidence, isn’t it?’
‘You’re missing the point,’ Leo says. ‘Runaway kid gets tattoo, big wow. It don’t mean nothing, Rose.’
Rose looks at me and I shrug, he’s right.
‘The thing is we know this is fucking weird, but they won’t think so. They won’t give a toss. We need to find out where she got it, because they won’t care.’
‘Well, we’ll tell Jackie and Max, because they know Nai, they know she wouldn’t ever do this,’ Rose says, defensive. She hates being wrong.
On that we all agree.
‘I need air,’ Leo says, shaking his head. ‘This place . . . ’
When he leaves his head is down, his hands shoved deep in his pockets.
‘How did we not see it?’ Jackie holds her daughter’s wrist, staring at the tattoo, Max standing behind, a deep valley forming between his brows. Ash stays by the window, the afternoon sun lighting up the fiery reds of her hair, her face perfectly blank as she watches. I watch her, wondering what is going on behind those dark eyes. ‘You can tell it’s new, the skin is still raised under the ink. It’s even a little bit pink still. Why didn’t you see it?’ She looks up at the doctor.
‘When she came in, there was a lot activity designed to save her life,’ Dr Whitecoat, or Dr Patterson, it says on her name badge, speaks. ‘It wasn’t top priority. Besides we had no idea what tattoos she might or might not have, there is a mention of it in the notes . . . ’
She rifles through the folder she is holding, and Jackie turns back to her daughter.
‘I thought I couldn’t touch her,’ Jackie looked at me, ‘I thought I might hurt her if I moved her. I didn’t even pick up her hand. If you hadn’t, Red, we would never have known.’
It seems like a strange thing to say, but I suppose everything seems strange to her now, especially since her daughter had been returned to her looking like a stranger, wearing a stranger’s mark.
‘Max, do you think we should tell the police? Because Naomi hated tattoos, thought they were tramp stamps, she always said. Our girl wouldn’t do this . . . ’
‘I dunno.’ Max’s hand rubs Jackie’s shoulders. ‘The Nai we thought we knew wouldn’t but kids do stuff you don’t expect all the time, love. I’ll call them, I’ll let them know, OK?’
‘This means something,’ Jackie half mutters to herself, and I see Ash’s expression shift, just a little bit. Ash thinks the same, I know she does.
Max is right. My parents don’t know anything about me, nothing that matters. Maybe Nai just got fucked off and fucked off. Maybe she got drunk and stoned and tattooed and maybe she hated herself so much it seemed like a good idea to throw herself off a bridge, or maybe she just fell.
Except.
‘What about the bruises, though?’ I look at the doctor. ‘The ones around her wrist?’
‘She was probably injured in the water,’ Dr Patterson glances at the door, keen to be somewhere else. ‘Knocked unconscious, battered around—’
‘Not here . . .’ I take Naomi’s arm and carefully lift it. ‘These look like finger marks, like someone gripped her arm really hard.’
Nai’s mum covers her mouth with both hands, stifling a cry.
‘I’m not sure you are helping your friend’s mum very much,’ the doctor says as she takes Nai’s hand carefully from mine.
‘It’s impossible to tell what caused these bruises. Naomi is bruised all over.’ She stands straight, taking control of everyone in the room. ‘Naomi is in a fragile state. We still don’t know the outcome of her injuries. This is going to take time, and she needs peace and quiet and rest. I suggest you all go home now. Come back tomorrow, perhaps we will know some more then.’
I look at Ash and find her staring right at me, eyes glittering with all the anger she is shutting in. And I know how she feels. These people that don’t know Nai, they are ready to think the worst of her. Like she’s nothing; trash that brought it all on her herself. They don’t know the sweet, funny, talented girl we do. They aren’t seeing her at all.
‘I want to stay with her,’ Jackie tells the doctor, her tone lower. A warning.
‘You can, of course,’ Dr Patterson says. ‘But she doesn’t know you are here. She is heavily sedated. And you all need a break, some rest. Come back refreshed.’
‘Refreshed?’ Rose laughs, shaking her head at me.
‘We should go.’ Max puts his arm around Jackie. ‘Come on, kids, we’re still on for dinner, right?’
Leo is waiting for us outside.
‘Well?’ he said. ‘What did they say?’
‘They don’t think it means anything,’ Rose says. ‘They think she is just a crazy mixed-up kid who ran away, got a tattoo and probably tried to top herself. It’s like they don’t want to even look into it, it’s too complicated. It doesn’t change what they think happened.’
‘But they’re wrong,’ I say, talking to myself. ‘I know they are.’
9
Going back to Naomi’s house felt like a sort of homecoming, if an imperfect one, knowing that she wouldn’t be there. The truth was, all of us felt more at home around Nai’s place than we did with our own families. Jackie and Max were always pleased to see us, happy to feed us, let us hang out and stay over whenever we needed to. Nai’s house was a safe space, but even so it couldn’t protect her from the bullies that used to make her life a misery at school. Before us, before she had the band to insulate her, she’d run and run again. Jackie and Max tried to help, the school tried to help, but bullies don’t quit easily. There’d be days, Nai used to tell me, when she couldn’t stand the thought of school and she’d have to disappear for a little while, just to get her strength back, but she always came back eventually. I asked her why she never moved schools, and she said it was because then they would’ve won.
‘As scared as I was, I wasn’t going to let them win,’ she said.
And she smiled at me.
‘Because look at me now, I rule the school, dude.’
Nai’s mum is the best cook out of all of our mums, though you’d never say that to Leo’s mum if you wanted to see seventeen. The three of them, Ash and Naomi and Jackie, always cooked together, it was just what they did. I don’t know how to explain it exactly, but it was so full of love, that tiny kitchen. Full of steam, and smells and tastes and love. Jackie would tell us the story of her life over and over again, each time a little bit different, and never boring. Max was Turkish, widowed young for over a year and struggling alone with toddler Ashira when he’d met Jackie one day on the bus into Soho where he worked at a tailor’s. Jackie was loud, and tall – taller than him – skinny and blonde and never stopped talking. Every day they sat together on the bus, every day Jackie talked for England and Max would listen, smile and laugh. Every day for a week, Max dropped Ashira off at her aunt’s on his way to work. On the Friday Max asked Jackie out. They were married three months later.
‘There was no point in waiting, you see,’ Jackie would tell us, over and over again. ‘Because when you know, you know.’
And I’d try to remember my parents ever telling me with the same kind of love and happiness about how they met, and I realised that they never did. In my house, everything was proper and respectable, traditional, cold and miserable. In Nai’s house love was a constant, like the water in the tap. In mine, you had to look hard to see it, and you had to be six years old to feel it, or to imagine that you did, anyway.
Before all this happened, I’d sit there around the table while Leo and Rose goofed off about this or that, and watch Nai and her mum. I’d watch the way Nai’s eyes would meet Jackie’s when they talked, or passed a plate, or anything. I’d see this understanding and care between them and it was a bit like being that kid you see in movies with their nose pressed up against the sweetshop glass, full of longing. It’s embarrassing, to be my age and still have this thing where all I want is a hug off my mum, not that I’d ever tell anyone that.
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