‘I’m gonna kill someone,’ Leo says. ‘Someone is going to die.’
‘I can’t even imagine . . .’ I look at Leo and he puts his arms around me, more or less holding me up.
‘I found Nai’s story.’ When Ash speaks it’s automatic, like a robot, like she has to force out pre-programmed words. ‘Everything that happened between her and the man that groomed her, MrM00n he calls himself. Photos . . . videos. Every detail, everything. And there are photos of twenty other girls, just on his feed. One of them was Carly Shields, and yes . . . Danni. When they get bored with a girl they sometimes let her go, scare and shame her into not talking, I guess. There are tips on what to say to make a girl keep quiet. But also there were some names on there. . . and when I looked for them they had died, killed themselves, been in an accident, or were just listed as missing. There’s another girl on there now. His latest project, he’s still grooming her. It’s still a romance as far as she is concerned and nothing more. It hasn’t gone that far yet.’
‘Who is it?’ I ask her the question, but I already know the answer.
‘It’s Rose,’ she says.
32
Leo’s place. The moment Ashira told us what she had found, it had started to rain, cold slices of water coming down that soaked us through to the skin. As Aaron and his mates drifted away in small groups, we three stood there, the water pooling in every pore, caught in a loop of uncertainty. When you know something that massive, that devastating, where do you go next? How do you push into the next second and the one after and still make sense of the world around you?
In that moment, standing there in the rain, we didn’t know. And in this moment, as we arrive back at Leo’s flat, I still don’t. The only thing we can do is react, and the first thing Leo thought about was his mum, still locked in her bedroom. We did the one thing we could think of to do, we came back to help her.
It seems to take forever to get there, the last leg – travelling upwards in the creaky old lift – the longest of all. As we approach the front door my heart is pounding out some serious bass. I fear the worst, no that’s not right, I expect it. I’m overwhelmed by the feeling that someone has just dragged away the last veil of protection that was left over from the world of my childhood. A world where the sun was always bright and the sky was always blue, and now, now I’m left with this wash of grey and dirt and the realisation that bad things happen, not just out there, but to people I know, people I love. To me.
And it’s terrifying.
The flat door comes into view and it’s been left open, Aaron probably too high to care about checking if it was shut when they left. For a moment it’s pinned against the hall wall for a second by a sudden rise in the wind, and then it slams shut in our faces.
Leo unlocks it, and stops on the threshold, looking down the corridor. Inside it’s dark, very quiet, even though someone has left the TV on in the front room. At least Aaron isn’t there.
‘Mum?’ Leo calls out as he goes inside. ‘Mum?’
‘Leo?’ She replies at once, her bedroom door rattling as Leo races to it.
‘Hold on!’
She begins to cry from the other side of the door as Leo fumbles with the padlock, trying a few times to open it, even though the key was left in the lock and really only needed turning, but even easy things are hard to do when you are trembling.
The second the door is open, Leo is enveloped in his mum’s embrace, his arms coiling around her in return.
‘I’ve been going out of my mind!’ She speaks between gasps. ‘Where have you been, what did you do? What did he do?’
‘Nothing, Mum.’ Leo tries to reassure her. ‘Nothing. It was all talk. All show, he hasn’t done anything, it’s fine, everything is OK.’
‘He wouldn’t listen to me, and when I wouldn’t shut up like he wanted me to, he hit me and he locked me in there. I was so frightened.’ She looks up at Leo, grabbing him by the face. ‘He can’t live here any more, Leo. He’s my son and I swore to love him from the day he was born, but I can’t keep that promise while I am afraid of him and afraid for you. We can’t stay here if he’s here. I know he’s your brother, but . . . ’
‘I know, Mum.’ Leo nods. ‘We need to get out of here. You need to get some stuff together and go to Aunty Chloe’s, yeah? For a couple of nights.’
‘And you, too,’ she says. ‘I need you with me, Leo. I need to know you are safe at least.’
‘I’m going to stay with Red.’ Leo looks at me, and I nod. ‘We’ve got band practice tomorrow, haven’t we? So I’m going to stay over. And after we’ve had a couple of days away we’ll figure out what to do. Maybe we can try and talk to Aaron, get him away from the people and the drugs. Because do you remember, Mum, what he used to be like? How he stepped up when Dad died, and how he used to spend hours making model planes, remember that?’
‘I remember.’
‘There’s still got to be a way to get him back,’ Leo says. ‘The way he used to be when I was a little kid. We just got to figure out how. Go and pack your bag, Mum, phone Aunty Chloe, tell her you’re on your way.’
‘You are a good boy, Leo,’ she says kissing him on each cheek. ‘You’ll be OK, with Red?’ She looks at me, and then at Ashira. ‘You’ll be safe?’
‘He’ll be fine,’ Ash says. ‘I promise.’
And for some reason that reassures her.
‘Fuck.’ Leo drops his head in his hands, the moment she leaves the room, and we all collapse into the same moment, the same how-has-this-happened madness. ‘What’s going on?’
‘This time, the only answer is we go to the police, Ash. Tell them what you found. You have proof, they’ll believe you.’
‘No,’ Ash says, and for the first time since she found us under the arches, I see how this discovery has dragged through her, taking a good part of her away with it, draining her of almost all the rainbow of colours that makes her who she is so that I am looking at someone who is more or less a monotone girl. ‘If I can charge up Nai’s phone and unlock it then we might be able to find out who MrM00n is. And I want to get him. I want to. I want him and all those other . . . scum to know it’s me that ended them.’
‘Ashira,’ I begin to say cautiously, ‘you can’t really want to kill him . . . ’
‘No, I’m not going to kill him, I’m not violent. I can do better than that,’ she says. ‘So. Much. Better. I’m going to bring his life down in ruins and then I’m going to make sure he has to live with it.’
‘I’m ready, I think.’ But Leo’s mum appears just at the moment Aaron throws open the front door. If he looked bad before, it’s a hundred times worse now. I like to think I’m a bit street, a bit cool, that living in London means I know what life is really about, but I’ve never seen someone this gripped by drugs before, like there’s a fist squeezing him in the middle, sending all the blood and guts to his face.
‘I didn’t say you could let her out.’ Aaron grabs Leo by the neck of his hoodie, sticking his face in his. This is where I step in, I think distantly, where I tell him to lay off my mate. But that’s not what I do, I find myself shrinking back from his fury, sensing that the danger is real. The air around him stinks of booze, smoke and something else. I’ve seen angry, and I’ve seen hurt, I’ve seen drunk and I’ve seen drug-crazed. But looking at Aaron, I see all of those things, mixed up in a swirl of something more, something terrifying. And I just want to run.
But there is no way out.
‘You can’t keep her locked up.’ Leo does his best to look unconcerned, straightening his shoulder, jerking himself free from his brother’s grasp. And all I want to do is to cry out to him, stop, don’t talk to him, don’t move, don’t even breathe if it might risk triggering the trip wire that is stretched so tight, arming a bomb that could blow any minute.
‘Aaron, no.’ Leo’s mum’s voice is very quiet, very afraid.
‘She’s our mum, not an animal, bro,’ Leo says.
‘It’s OK, son, let it go,’ Leo’s mum rep
lies.
‘You telling me what I can do?’ Aaron’s clenched fist is drawn back, locked and loaded. ‘YOU TELLING ME WHAT I CAN DO?’
It happens so quickly that when I see Leo sprawled on his back at Aaron’s feet, blood exploded across his face, it takes me a while to make sense of what happened, like a bad jump-cut in a horror movie. This is not me, this person frozen to the spot in terror, who doesn’t go to their friend, this is not who I am. I want to go to his side, step in front of Leo, but I don’t. I can’t move. I can’t breathe.
‘Let me tell you something, bro,’ Aaron takes the gun from the pocket of his joggers and levels it at Leo’s head, the muzzle touching his forehead, ‘I’m getting tired of people telling me what I can and can’t do. I’m getting bored of fools who don’t show me any respect. You respect me, you got that? She respects me, and you both do what I tell you to do, because I own you. I own these freaks, I own this fucking town, and if I want to burn it down to the ground with you in it, I will. Don’t you think that I won’t, because I will. I fucking will.’
‘Oh please, boring,’ Ashira says.
I hear her voice, I’m aware of the shape of her, but I can’t stop looking at the muzzle of the gun as he releases it from Leo’s forehead and searches her out, staring her square in the chest.
‘Do you want to die, bitch?’ Aaron asks her. ‘Who the fuck are you anyway?’
‘Sometimes I do want to die.’ Ashira takes a step closer to the end of the gun with every word. ‘Sometimes I think oblivion might be the easy way out. But you know what? You are so lucky to have a family that care about you, to have a brother who’s trying to take care of you. If my little sister was around, if she was awake and undamaged and I had the chance to do things differently, like you do, the actual very last fucking thing I would do is try to intimidate and scare the shit out of her with a fucking gun, arsehole.’ She takes another step closer and my knees give way, I fold onto the floor, my body feels like it’s disappearing around me, and only my eyes remain fixed by fear.
‘Ash.’ I try and whisper her name, but nothing comes.
‘You must be a very scared man,’ Ashira says, and even though that bullet is aimed right at her, her voice is gentle now, and tender. ‘You have to be. You have to be very scared and very lonely for the idea of respect to mean more to you than the love of your family, the life of your brother. And I get that, I think. What it means to feel that fucked up. I feel that fucked up. But there are still choices to be made, to live or die. Kill or care. So if you need to pull a trigger to feel like a man, go ahead. You’ll end up back inside, for good this time, and maybe that’s the only place you will ever be anyone. So put my brains on the wallpaper, if it makes you feel any better. I really don’t give a shit.’
Despite everything I thought I’d learnt about Ashira since that day when I found her hacking traffic cams, I never really knew her until this very second, when suddenly I see so clearly the vast and unlit ocean of sadness she has to navigate alone, every day. So raw, so real that she looks at a man half out of his mind – with a gun in his hand – and feels some kind of recognition, some kind of hope, even.
Aaron doesn’t move, not for one, two, three, four, five, six seconds. By ten seconds and with the gun still pointed at us, he walks out of the flat, slamming the door to a close behind him.
DarkM00n Locked In
There’s nothing but dirt here, nothing but dark,
Animals in shadows
That want to rip me apart
There’s nothing but hurt here, nothing but pain,
Cold cruel hellos
Again and again and again. . .
You told me there’d always be sunshine,
You told me there’d always be you,
You made me believe in believing
And then you locked me in.
You locked me in.
You tell me I have to smile, even when I taste blood.
You say they want to see teeth
It’s a sign of love when you hurt me so hard
There’s not love here, just pain.
You say I am your own private feast
You bite me again and again. And again…
You told me there’d always be sunshine,
You told me there’d always be you,
You made me believe in believing
And then you locked me in.
You locked me in.
33
The sun is high enough in the sky to come cutting through the narrow gaps in my curtains and dazzle me awake. Very, very slowly I open my eyes, my lashes tugging as they untangle. My phone tells me it’s almost midday, so why does my body feel so heavy with sleep? And so sore, like I’ve been beaten up from the inside out. As I register the sound of breathing from the floor, every moment of yesterday comes back in one chaotic crazy rush. Rolling over I see Leo, still out of it, in his sleeping bag on the floor, eyes closed and looking like a little kid. Leaning against the wall, Ashira is sitting with her legs stretched out in front of her, a deep line between her eyebrows as she stares at her laptop screen. The last thing I remember from last night is her sitting exactly like this as I went to sleep. She might have been like that all night.
We didn’t have to stay together last night. Leo could have gone with his poor, tearful mum to his Aunty Chloe’s, and Ashira could have gone home to her mum and dad. But when it came down to it, not one of us wanted to say goodbye to the others. It felt safer to be together, that’s all. We didn’t talk about what Aaron did, we didn’t talk about what Ashira did. We just wanted to stick together. And the easiest place to do that, and to do what had to be done, was at my house.
Even so we felt the presence of the missing. Naomi, who would have been so freaked out to see her big sister hanging out in my bedroom, and Rose. More than twenty-fours have passed, and I have no idea what happened to her in any of them, and that is so strange and so different that it feels like she’s left for the moon.
Watching the rise and fall of Leo’s chest, I wonder what Rose is doing now. On almost any other day of the week in the last year I would know exactly, within seconds of waking up. But today she isn’t here. So much has happened, so much that would matter to her too, just as much as it matters to any of us. She isn’t here and . . . she could be with him. He could be using her right now and the thought of that kills me. Ash said that it wasn’t at that stage yet, but Ash is obsessed with bringing these creeps down herself. What if Ash is wrong?
Leo’s phone is on the floor next to him, one end of it poking out from under his sleeping bag. Glancing up at Ashira I see she is still staring hard into her laptop screen, and Leo rolls onto his side, facing away from me. After a moment’s hesitation I pick up Leo’s phone, turning it over in my hand. I don’t know the code that unlocks it, but I can see the notifications on his screen. Sure enough there are five messages from Rose. I can’t see all of them, just the preview.
Hey loser, what were you up to yesterday, everything OK? I’ve been . . .
Leo, are you around, I could really do with talking to you about something . . .
I’m not sure how I feel about today. I don’t really know how to . . .
I wish you’d answer me, have you got a problem with me?
Leo WTF! Are you OK? Where are you now?
‘The code is probably his birthday,’ Ashira whispers, and I drop the phone, pushing it back in place. When I glance up she is watching me, with half a crooked smile. ‘If you want to get into his phone.’
‘I don’t want to get into his phone,’ I say. ‘I thought it was mine for a second, still half asleep.’
‘Rose put up a thing on all her media, saying to lay off you and that everything was OK between you.’
‘Did she?’ I brighten, sitting up. ‘Does she seem all right? She doesn’t seem like . . . like . . . you know?’
‘Not as far as I can tell,’ Ash says. ‘This guy is locked up pretty tight here, I can’t ID him. I have to hope that I can charge Nai
’s phone today and see if there’s anything on that.’
‘Ash . . . what if we are putting Rose in danger by not going to the police?’
‘We aren’t, he posted on the dark site last night saying they are still just kissing and holding hands, that he wants to prove to her how much he cares about her. He said another week of that and she’ll be eating out of his hand. He said that’s when he’ll nail her. Set up a video link and everything.’
‘Oh God.’ I press my hands over my mouth, bitter-tasting acid rising in my throat. This is real, it’s happening, but it feels like being trapped in the last fifteen minutes of a horror movie which just keeps looping over and over. ‘Oh God, Ash . . . ’
‘Look, don’t worry.’ She smiles at me briefly, it’s gone almost before I see it and yet somehow it helps. ‘I’ll have him by then.’
‘What are you doing, anyway? Did you even sleep?’
‘There’s no way that I’m going to sleep properly until this is done,’ she says, looking up at me. ‘I mean yeah, I got my head down for a little bit, I don’t want to lose my edge. But I need to stay on this every minute I can if I’m going to track him down. I want his email, I want his cloud, I want his internet history, I want everything.’
‘That’s illegal, you realise that.’
‘Obviously.’ Ashira lifts her chin. ‘Are you afraid of breaking the law?’
It’s a challenge, I see it there in her dark eyes, and I know whatever I say next will affect the way she thinks of me.
‘No,’ I say very carefully, and deliberately. ‘But I am afraid of you getting caught, and him getting away with what he’s doing.’
Ashira’s mouth curls into a dangerous smile.
‘That isn’t going to happen, Red,’ she assures me. ‘You – you are brilliant at playing the drums, you don’t question if you are good, you just know that you are. Well, that’s me, and this shit. I’m good at it.’
‘I know,’ I return her smile, ‘I’m just saying if we go to the police today, talk to them today, then they have people who can do all of this, and get him. It doesn’t have to be us. It doesn’t have to be you.’
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