Freefall

by Mark Furness

  The drive back to Brighton with Kate at the wheel started in silence. It was raining heavily, the wipers squeaking a surreal beat and the oncoming headlights hurting my eyes. I was in the front passenger seat. Tears trickled down Kate’s cheeks, camouflaged by the shadows of raindrops through the windscreen. I rubbed a few tears from my eye sockets.

  Malcolm had died as I slumped unconscious on that toilet seat at the Dorchester.

  The calls that saved me were made by Alice trying to give me the news.

  XXII

  KATE WAS not one for holding the hands of corpses. She had chosen to drive to London to collect me after a quick viewing of Malcolm’s body.

  There had been a family dinner at Kate’s earlier in the evening with uncles Trev and Ryan and their families, to which I had been invited and which I had forgotten. A call from Malcolm’s doctor at the hospital had interrupted the dinner with the report of his death.

  On the London to Brighton road, Kate kept the radio off until Alice could take the silence no longer and asked if she could turn it on. Coldplay’s “Yellow” joined us together somehow. All except Hugo; he wore his earmuff headset plugged into his mobile phone, cocooning his mind in some other place. It was nearly midnight when we got back to Marine Parade.

  Alice patted me on the arm as we entered the flat. “I believe you, Dad,” she said, doing so deliberately in front of Kate and Hugo.

  They didn’t respond.

  During the night, I dreamed someone had cut off my arms and legs and piled them next to my head and torso on the bed like bloody pick-up-sticks. Charlotte was sitting on the end of my bed. She was toying with one of my severed legs, examining it like a puzzle piece. She lifted my head gently like a mother with a sleepy child and placed the leg under my head as if it was a pillow. “You’ve fallen apart,” she said.

  “GAR!”

  Kate’s voice was outside my bedroom door. I could see it was morning from a patch of blue sky that was visible through the French doors to the rooftop terrace.

  “Phone call for you downstairs. It’s the policeman who was at St Thomas’s.”

  The constable was on the fixed line phone that hung on the wall in the kitchen. Kate started making a pot of tea, her ears pricked up.

  “Mr Hart, it’s Constable Burchill here. I’m afraid I have some difficult news.”

  “What’s that?”

  “My gov’ner wants you charged for possession of narcotics. There were five grams of almost pure heroin in your possession. He doesn’t believe your story. You will be receiving a summons to appear in court. You should get legal advice.”

  Kate was hovering.

  I hung up. “They’re trying to locate the couple,” I said.

  I went for a long walk on the windy beach under a dirty orange sky, thinking: it had to be Baker who sent the couple to the Dorchester. Was Cliff McDonald at risk now? I had survived. Would they be back? Would they use Alice and Hugo to break me completely if I pressed on?

  I slept during the afternoon, assisted by one of Kate’s poorly-hidden Valium tablets that she kept in her bathroom cabinet. Jack Darling’s phone call woke me in the gloom of early evening. It knocked me for six.

  “You’re gone, mate,” he said. “We have to let you go.”

  I swung my legs around, sat on the edge of the bed and switched on the bedside light. My head thumped, my tongue felt raw. I lapped a few drops of water from the all-but-empty glass on the bedside table.

  “Why?” I said. “What’s happened?”

  I hadn’t told Jack, nor Claire, nor Cliff about yesterday’s events. That was my next job. Maybe the BKB PR woman had gleefully phoned Cliff, who’d gone to Jack. Had Kate phoned Jack?

  “For fuck sake, Gar, you need that counselling now,” said Jack.

  “They tried to kill me,” I said. “How is that a sacking offence?”

  Jack wasn’t listening.

  “Why the hell have you threatened Baker’s daughter? And to top it off, you go back at East’s whole family. Now he’s got an Apprehended Violence Order against you. His wife’s a judge, for fuck’s sake. And now I’m in this sea of shit with you.”

  “I’ve got no idea what you are talking about.”

  “I’ve had enough, Gar. When you want to sober up and tell me the truth, call me. I’ve got an editorial conference now. Don’t go anywhere near The Citizen’s office. Don’t call anyone.”

  I lay on the bed. My head spun; ringing started in my ears. I rolled on my side and checked the outgoing call log on my phone. Gears clicked into place when I saw the numbers.

  The fringe-comber had knocked me out, and for good measure he’d used my phone to text Charles East. For fuck’s sake, his girlfriend had got me to open my phone in front of her so we could play her favourite dog video. She must have seen me key-in my password. The text read: “You’re dead, cunt. You, wife, kids. I’m closing your eyes.” It was despatched around the time I was in the toilet cubicle at the Dorchester.

  There was another number on my phone’s outgoing call register that I didn’t recognise. A voice call was made to the number. It had lasted 26 seconds. I hit redial. Luckily it went straight to voice mail before the owner answered: “Hi. This is Anita Baker. Please leave a message and I will return your call.”

  You can download a lot of vitriol in 26 seconds. All the fringe-comber had to do was twist his voice a bit. It didn’t have to sound exactly like me. It just had to sound like it could have been me in a manic, heroin-drenched froth. Mentally unhinged, as Charles East had called me.

  I went back to Kate’s bathroom cabinet. I washed down two Valium with a few swigs of the bottle of duty-free bourbon I had in the bedroom, then I swigged more. I might have had another Valium. A bit later I reeled and collapsed in bed.

  XXIII

  IN A COUNCIL flat in a tower block on the outskirts of London, two men, dressed in grey track pants and hoodies, adjusted their cheap party masks inside. The masks depicted the faces of girls. Not very pretty: more Miss Piggy than Snow White. A phone trilled inside one man’s pocket.

  “I’ve got him,” said the girl. “We’ll be there in about five minutes.”

  The man did not reply. He hung up and gave a thumbs-up to his companion, who pulled his phone from his pants pocket and connected the handset by Bluetooth to a single speaker that sat on the grimy carpet in the sitting room. Techno music thumped from the black box, pulsing with an underlying beat that mimicked the rhythm of the human heart – one that was momentarily calm, then racing and irregular, as if it was being shot by bursts of excitement or fear.

  The man who had taken the call from the girl stepped through a door into a filthy kitchen and needlessly rearranged a brown-glass bottle full of fluid and a hand-sized pad of medical gauze that sat on a bench. He stepped back into the sitting room: playing with his hands, pacing. His companion was propped on the only piece of furniture: a shabby sofa. He was playing with several black Velcro straps, re-sealing, then peeling them with a zipping noise that was barely audible against the relentless doof-doof! da-doof! from the speaker that vibrated their ribcages.

  “ARE YOU SURE THIS IS the place?” asked the teenage boy as the older girl led him up the windswept external stairs of the council flat. He guessed they had been walking for about fifteen minutes from the Three Bridges railway station on the line between London and Brighton.

  “Yes,” she said, failing to disguise mild annoyance. “Where do you think I’m taking you?”

  “Sorry,” said the boy. “It’s just that I expected Ruby to meet me at the station.”

  “I told you. She’s already at the party. Here. Chill.” She thrust a large vodka bottle at him with her black-leather-gloved hands.

  The boy fought two emotions: part of him wanted to run; part of him wanted to stay the course of the adventure he had embarked upon. The boy took the vodka, had a hefty swig, and handed the bottle back.

  There was no way he wanted to come across as Mr Straighty-one-eighty in front of
this lean, pretty, uber-cool girl he guessed was older than twenty, and was as hard to impress as she was to fathom. Despite the grey sky, she wore large sunglasses and a droopy-topped, rainbow-coloured beanie into which she had tucked all of her hair. He could tell she was a white woman only from the exposed skin of her cheeks and neck. Her accent suggested she was of Irish origin and he liked the mellow tone.

  If he was going to a party on a school day, he was going to party. As the vodka warmed and emboldened him, he wondered what sort of drugs might be available inside the flat they were approaching. He had plenty of cash in his pocket. Most of all, he wanted to meet Ruby in the flesh. He hoped that she would match her online profile. Even if she was only half as pretty in reality, he’d still be happy.

  On the fourth floor of the block of flats, the girl stopped outside a bruised blue door. The windows on either side of the door were boarded with raw plywood but the thumping beat of The Crank, the boy’s favourite band, and Ruby’s too, was humping inside.

  “You take the bottle in,” said the girl, handing the boy the vodka.

  He was happy with that, being the booze carrier. With his fingers, he dragged the wavy, lop-sided fringe of his dark hair across his forehead and watched her knock on the door. It opened.

  “You first.” She shoved him inside.

  It was dim in the hallway. The girl stayed outside on the landing and pulled the door shut. The smell made him dry-retch: urine and faeces. His heart galloped.

  A masked face lunged sideways into the hallway through a doorframe. “Hello!” boomed a gritty male voice. “I’m Ruby.”

  The other man poked his matching masked face into the hallway, just below his companion’s. “I’m Ruby too!”

  The boy dropped the vodka bottle and backed against the front door. He grabbed at the handle but it was deadlocked. The men’s hands were upon him. He faced them and threw his clenched fists, cracking into their arms and torsos, kicking and kneeing them. They absorbed his fury, draining his energy, then let him go. He fell back against the door. The boy crouched, panting, cornered. He plunged a hand into his jeans pocket, searching for his phone.

  The men moved in and wrestled the boy; one slapped his face hard and snatched his phone. The other man head-locked the boy inside the elbow of an arm and dragged his captive into the sitting room. His sidekick stepped to the kitchen, took the stopper out of the brown bottle and carried it, with the wad of gauze, into the sitting room.

  The chemical-carrier put his mouth close to the head-locked boy’s ear and said, “Ruby and I are going to have some fun with you, my little man. But we are going to do you a big favour. When you have a sniff of this, you will go on a nice holiday. You might be a bit sore when you wake up, but hey, you’ll get over it. Nothing a few stitches won’t fix.”

  “Dad!” the boy screamed into the horrible drumbeats that shook the room, beats that blurred with the pounding inside his chest: racing, skipping, tripping. He smelt a bleach-and-vinegar-like stink as the soaked cloth was clamped over his nose and mouth, and he refused to breathe it. Nothing a few stiches won’t fix! Are these men going to harvest my organs, he wondered. He was suffocating, his chest aching, burning, imploding. He gasped for air. He could not stop his eyes closing; inside his head, neon green and orange blobs barged into each other like globules in a lava lamp. They began tearing each other apart.

  THE SUN WAS FALLING when the men, unmasked, but with their hoodie-tops pulled over their heads, ushered the unconscious boy out of the flat, carrying him between them, his arms spread over each of their shoulders. In the street, they opened the sliding doors of a parked tradesman’s van and climbed in. The girl was sitting behind the steering wheel. She started the engine.

  XXIV

  I HEARD KNOCKING at my bedroom door. My veins and arteries felt filled with weed killer, and my head with hot lead, but I managed to pull it up off the pillow. The clock said it was early evening. The near-empty bottle of bourbon was an ugly sight. I was still dressed, if that’s what you’d call a man who’d rolled around fully clothed on his bed in a sweaty heap for fourteen hours. Alice opened the door.

  “Nanna had a call from the school. Hugo didn’t arrive this morning. We’ve been calling him for hours. He’s not answering his phone.”

  “Clancy,” I said. “Is he with that kid?”

  “Clancy is with his exchange family on a driving holiday in Scotland. He doesn’t know where Hugo is.”

  The possibilities whirled inside my head. I sat on the side of my bed, approaching a standing position in increments. It took a few minutes to dress and shuffle downstairs.

  Alice and Kate were sitting at the kitchen table. I drank a couple of glasses of water in quick succession and sat with them. No-one spoke. I phoned Hugo, got his voice mail, left a message.

  “We should call the police and report him missing,” said Kate.

  “Did you ever skive off school?” I said, ducking from the nightmare possibilities.

  “No.”

  I realised she and Alice had spent hours stewing before they woke me from my torpor. They were well ahead of me, emotionally and rationally.

  Alice was pale. “He’s been acting weird lately. I should have talked to him.”

  “Your father should have talked to him,” said Kate. “Your father should have noticed.”

  The big clock on the kitchen wall ticked loudly. I kept phoning Hugo.

  “Alice,” I said. “Can we get into Hugo’s laptop?”

  Alice and I went to his room. His laptop was password protected. We tried a few guesses. Nothing worked.

  Alice said: “Could Hugo be in trouble, Dad? Like Claire in Sydney?”

  “I don’t think so, sweetheart,” I said, being careful not to tug my ear.

  Kate was standing in the doorway listening.

  “You’re pathetic, Gar. I’m going to report him missing. If he was okay, he would call us or answer.”

  Kate and Alice found Hugo’s passport in a dresser drawer, put on their coats and drove to the police station.

  I needed to move. It was autumn and the days were shortening. The sun was down when I put my coat on and walked into the city. A mist was in. The shops were closing. It was cold and people wore hats and scarves. Lots of young men had their hoodies pulled over their heads. They scowled as I tried to see their faces. I trawled the narrow shopping lanes and side streets, peering into café windows. I prowled the pubs. I kept phoning Hugo, begging him to call me. I phoned the Halliday’s home number a couple of times. Kate and Alice had returned but Hugo was still missing. It was about 9pm when I turned the corner back into Marine Parade. I saw Kate open the curtains onto the street and look out. As I approached the entrance to the Halliday’s flat, I saw a curled figure lying on the footpath near the steps. I ran to it.

  Hugo was unconscious but breathing. There was a typewritten note pinned to the breast of his leather hoodie jacket: Now you are hurting your children.

  I phoned an ambulance and then I phoned upstairs to Kate.

  Hugo had bruises and scratches on his knuckles. There was dried blood on his top lip under his nose. I tore off the note before Kate and Alice reached us with blankets. The ambulance arrived.

  XXV

  I RODE with Hugo in the ambulance. Kate and Alice followed by car. By the time the ambulance stopped under the covered entrance of the Accident and Emergency department, Hugo was conscious and holding my hand. He didn’t speak but he locked his eyes on mine, though he seemed to be wondering if I was really there.

  We sat in the waiting room while Hugo was attended by a medical team. A doctor emerged, a young Asian woman in a white coat with a gentle smile and delicate hands that she offered to each of us in turn.

  “Hugo has suffered some trauma,” she said. “We’ve given him sedation. He’s resting but conscious. We need to do some tests. ”

  “What sort of trauma?” I said.

  “A sexual assault.”

  “Oh, god,” said Kate. “Can we see
him now?”

  “Yes, but he wants to see his father first,” the doctor said. “Alone.”

  Hugo had a saline drip in his arm to combat dehydration from the shock, the doctor said. She left us. I sat in a chair close to the bedside and we stared at the cubicle’s blue curtains for a while. It was like I’d gone back in time 48 hours to St Thomas’s Hospital in London. Hugo’s place was darker though. It was clear from his face.

  “Do you want to tell me?”

  Hugo motioned for the plastic cup of water on his table and I handed it to him. It took a minute, maybe two, before he spoke.

  “We met some girls,” he said, “on Facebook. There’s a band we’ve been following.”

  “You and Clancy? A fan club thing?”

  “I guess so. They asked us for pictures.”

  “The girls?”

  He nodded.

  “What sort of pictures?”

  “We did it live to my laptop camera.”

  “No clothes,” I said.

  Hugo closed his eyes. “We went first, me and Clancy.”

  “And then?”

  “I went to meet one of them today.”

  Hugo sipped from the plastic cup. He pulled his hand away from mine.

  “They weren’t girls, Dad.” Hugo started shaking.

  I tightened my grip on his hand.

  “I thought they were going to cut out my kidneys.”

  “What?”

  It was a few moments before he started talking again, mostly whispering about what he remembered happening in the flat. He said he didn’t wake at all, after they gassed him with some chemicals on a rag, not until he saw my face in the ambulance.

  I wasn’t convinced.