Boy A Read online

  ‘No, I’m sorry,’ Terry says. ‘You’re right. It’s crazy to assume something bad’s happened. It could be anything; and I didn’t mean to doubt your feelings for her. Look, I’ll get in touch with the police when I get back to the flat, use some of my contacts, make sure the car hasn’t been in an accident or anything.’

  There is a turquoise Clio by the side of a country road, but the police are not aware of it. There’s no reason why they should be. It’s parked neatly in a lay-by; it’s not abandoned. There’s no sign of damage on its womanly curves. Its driver is dishevelled, and certainly feels like she’s been in an accident, but the car is her comfort not the cause.

  She drove in it straight from work, with the excuse of sickness hardly needed, because of the pain and confusion which was written over her features. She’s slept in the Clio for two nights now, each time driving until she found herself a place to pull in, that was concealed from all sides. Resting in secret gardens, nesting in forgotten forests, in alien parts of counties she’s never been to before. She only leaves the Clio’s security to buy fuel and food, and to toilet when she must. The car is a protective carapace, which clothes her and coats her in a hardness that she needs, because she’s suddenly scared the world will discover how soft and squashable she is.

  She is living like this because she does indeed need to think, because she thinks best when she’s driving and because she doesn’t know what else she can do. She is used to problem-solving, to helping herself to what she wants from the world, managing the things around her that can be controlled, and disentangling them from the things that must be left. Her life was previously a mental test, to be ordered and corrected. Her dream has always been to be able, one day, to sit back and admire the balance and perfection of the land that she has built for herself. In recent months, when she thought like this, Jack was beside her, they were stretched back together in her imaginings. A perfect partner to make an even number. Avoiding the loneliness that her mother was never quite able to conceal.

  On Friday she cracked the last side of the Rubik’s Cube that had been puzzling her for sometime: the part of Jack that somehow didn’t quite fit in her scheme of how it all should be. The final few squares clicked into place in her mind, and the finishing face became clear on the cube. But the completed picture was horrible, more horrible than she could begin to think how to deal with. And in solving that one side, she discovered she had ruined the other five. The parts of her life which had been complete were fragmented and distorted, and none of it made sense at all.

  She starts the Clio up, and sweeps the layer of litter from the dash. The detritus of a Sunday lunch of crisps and chocolate, crumpled like the creases of her worry, tumbles on to the passenger-side floor. Where, underneath three days’ failed attempts at comfort-eating, are the lumps of dirt from Jack’s boots that first soiled her car. His footprints have stained her world in the same way, but she doesn’t hate him. She can’t hate him. Because the place in her that Jack inhabits, the space she would need to hate, is already taken up by hate’s opposite. Therein lies the problem, this is what makes things harder. If she could work up the loathing and the anger, she would confront him. She’s not scared. Michelle’s not scared of anything. But she can’t confront him with indecision. She needs to know what she’s going to do before she can talk to Jack. She needs a plan, she needs order, so she has to keep driving.

  The car in front of her is a learner, taking the road painfully slowly. But Michelle’s not in a hurry; she won’t even know where she’s going till she gets there. Its L-plate is hanging off, attached only by one corner, reminding her of an ad-campaign by the Tories: ‘You Can’t Trust Labour,’ where the L was a swinging plate like that one. It was the ‘trust’ that did the job though, that’s what scared people: it’s all about trust.

  She was crying out for it from Jack. That’s why she let him take those photos, why she gave him one. She was telling him she trusted him, asking why he couldn’t trust her back. Asking what it was that he couldn’t tell her. The invisible obstacle holding them apart, like the six-inch dancing rule she had always disobeyed at school.

  But when he told her what it was, it still didn’t count. He didn’t trust her. He was asleep. The first night they’d been together when they hadn’t had sex. Normally he was insatiable, he couldn’t stop touching her. He was the only man she’d ever met who could consistently wear her out. But that night he wasn’t interested, said he was too tired and then didn’t fall asleep for hours. He kept her awake too, squirming like there was a snake in the bed. And when he did eventually fall asleep, he started talking, calling out a name: ‘Angela, Angela.’ Michelle was upset to begin with, thinking Angela was an ex-girlfriend, thinking maybe that was his big secret, why he didn’t like to talk about his past: that he was still hung up on her. Then she became angry; she thought that he must still be seeing this Angela, that he was leading her on. By morning Michelle was convinced that the mysterious ‘Uncle Terry’ was nothing more than a ruse to shag his other woman. She had been livid in the car on the way in to work, and he hadn’t even noticed; hadn’t even asked what was wrong.

  She gets angry with the learner, just thinking about it, slips the Clio down a gear and snarls the engine, to overtake though a gap which isn’t really big enough. She catches the vinegary smell of her own armpit as she slides the gear lever back again. She hasn’t had a shower in three days. This isn’t good. She can’t go on for ever sleeping in her car. But she hasn’t sorted out her head yet. She’s already decided she’s not going in to work tomorrow. Dave can fuck himself if he thinks she’s even ringing in. Her phone battery’s dead anyway.

  The first night she spent hours trying to think who she could call, which of her friends she could talk to about this, whether she could burden her mum with it. By the time she’d decided not to rely on any of them, it was academic. Her Motorola didn’t have the power left.

  She needs to find somewhere to stay, now. A cheap guest-house or a little B&B. It must be as out of season as it gets; she’ll be able to find something. She’s not going back to that desk.

  She was sat at the desk when it clicked. When the true view slid into place. When the missing past, and the innocence and the guilt, all became a single logical whole. Sneaking a look at the paper, a petty revenge because Dave, as usual, had pissed her off. A story about an Angela, the same name she was competing with. Angela Milton, this one. The memory of a girl, about her own age, but who would remain forever ten. Still in the news nearly a decade and a half after her death. Another paper, a less scrupulous paper it seems, had produced an aged picture of the killer. Might yet be prosecuted for breaking some court-enforced code. Her paper, a good paper, showed only the same photo as always. The single allowed shot of a ten-year-old murderer. A picture she must have seen so many times that it had become familiar. Because the face was familiar; there was no doubting that. And then a shudder passed through her. Like an ice-cube down the back. But not a joke. Far from funny. She wanted to scream.

  Michelle is not a screamer by nature. As a kid she laughed at girls who squealed at mice and frogs. Even alone in a park, she once calmly showed her finger to a flasher who showed his wares. But as she pulled the photo of Jack from her purse; her portrait of a man who talks in his sleep, and appears from nowhere with no previous life, as she pressed it flat beside the paper, she struggled to choke down a scream.

  She told herself she wasn’t right, that it was impossible, far-fetched-fantasy. But she knew suddenly and certainly that it was right, she knew who Jack was. And what she’d always known somewhere, secretly: that he wasn’t Jack. That he would never be Jack; no matter how many wallets she had the name put on.

  She stared in horror at the only officially released photo, of a boy who became a man that she had slept with, that she loved. Most people would never recognize him from it. He had changed as much as it must be possible for a child to change in fifteen years. The teeth were totally different for a start, the oversi
zed bucked over-bite was gone. But she had curled her tongue around Jack’s perfect, false, front-teeth. Licked the joining ridges where those two tombstones must once have been rooted. And the eyes were still there, though even now, more of a pair. Eyes as blue as a husky dog’s. That stared at you, wanting something.

  Her finger traced the cheekbones in the paper, high and podgy. Puppy-fatted younger brothers to those that she had brushed in soft, long, butterfly kisses, trailing mascara down to his lips. Lips that sneered in pure evil in this picture, but that she had known to whisper and to kiss. His hair was darker in the paper, like a boy who hadn’t known sunlight. Though surely the opposite should be true. His face was fatter too. But she knew… The boy was Jack. So Jack was once that boy. And that fact changed everything.

  She could have forgiven him if he’d told her; she’s sure of that. She’s done things as a girl of which she’s not proud. She was always the strong one, the loud one, the one with the ideas, the ringleader. And when she looks back, she most likely made life hell, at some times, for some kids. Not in the same ball-park as what he did. Not in the same league. But playing the same game. A sport where someone else’s pain is fun. She is not who she once was. No one is. That’s what adulthood means. So why should Jack be any different?

  Perhaps it’s not as simple as that. Maybe she couldn’t ever really understand. But she could have forgiven. She’s sure. If only he’d told her.

  Could she have stayed with him, though? Could she have had kids with him one day? Would she have ever dared leave them with him? Could she do all that still? She can’t square the thing that he has done with the man she loves. If she still does. If she still can. If that’s even hers to choose.

  A sign on the road says ‘Blackpool 20m’, and this seems like a good idea, a place to start, a place to stay. There must be a million beds and baths in Blackpool, just for a few days or a week. Just time to think.

  W is for Worm.

  The Worm in the Apple.

  It was on the tube that the plan started. He was holding on to the overhead pole, which was as usual greasy to his touch: yellow plastic coating slick with the sweat of commuters. Like those all around him, unwelcome communal body-heat making his own palms hot, making them slide along the side bar. He’s squeamish about other people’s fluids, sweat included, but the lurch of the underground always demanded that he hold on. Worse than the filth was the fear of falling, of losing face. Around him other passengers, luckier passengers with seats and better lives, rocked gently back and forth like drowsy lunatics. ‘Another day another dollar,’ he thought. His brain forces these tired platitudes upon him, sentences that he would never consciously create, words that make him cringe even as they smirk into his mind. Stuff his father might say: back-burner bollocks from some should-be-forgotten B-movie.

  All films are classed as ‘B’ to him. He doesn’t like them. He resents their unrealistic assumption that everything happens for a reason, and everything will turn out all right. The same shit his dad thinks and probably got from films in the first place. He can’t understand the world in which his dad lives. Still hooked up to the television most nights, apart from his sacred Tuesdays. Great plastic stacks of videocassettes surrounding the living room in his flat. Videocassettes, not even DVD. If you like films so much, at least buy the equipment to enjoy them properly. ‘You can’t recreate the feel of the original,’ his dad says. To him it’s the same as the sad obsessive vinyl junkies he used to see through the windows of the shop down his old London street. It wasn’t even an actual shop, just a house with collapsing cardboard boxes loaded on to trestle tables. ‘Real Records’, said the scabby sign above the door. He views that shop, and all shops that purvey such unnecessary shod, as the downside of the free market. You have to let any old prick sell any old shit, that’s the way it works. It’s the demand that should die away. He doesn’t understand the demand.

  On that day, on the tube, still half an hour away from walking past the crap record shop, a young man with a grey mac and a mop of thick, perfectly tousled hair kept bouncing into him. He was six inches taller at least and had a superhero jaw. But wasn’t well-built; clearly didn’t work out much; would have been easy enough to beat the piss out of. If only it could be that simple. He suspected that the mac was about to become ultra-fashionable. Alex from his office had one. And he found that he hated that man with the same quiet loathing that he felt for Alex. He hated him for not apologizing for knocking him, and for not moving slightly further away after the first occurrence. He hated him for wearing a grey mac, crisp, all corners, so obviously going to be the new style, when he’d just bought a fucking tan one. Most of all he hated him for the confidence that allowed him to stand there, sure-footed, reading the Guardian, being a fucking lefty like his dad, without clutching the clammy bar as he had to. He sneaked a slight revenge: looking at the paper through the crook of the man’s arm. And in that space, between a stupidly expensive watch and the gloating grey mac, he saw a story about the release of a murderer. A man who killed a child when he was himself a child. He remembered his joy when the other kid was hanged in prison, years back, supposedly a suicide. Then the disappointment when he discovered it was the wrong one. Not the one his dad had all but adopted.

  It came like a sudden download of bytes, the realization. This was what it had all been about – his dad’s rushed move to Manchester. The sneaky fuck. He was helping the little bastard again. That was what made him forget the birthday. You travel halfway up the country to try and start afresh with the old man, make your own birthday dinner and he doesn’t even come home. Leaves you sitting alone after travelling all that way. Leaves his own son playing second fiddle to that sicko. Just like when he was a boy. Only he wasn’t a boy anymore, was he? So what was he going to do about it?

  The old man was pathetically grateful when Zed asked if he could move in with him for a bit. Acted like his son was doing him the favour. So Zed played along, played ‘Zeb’ for a while. Terry’s the only person who calls him that, always has to be different doesn’t he? He’s never understood that names matter.

  There’s great power in names; Zed knows it. Jews never write ‘Yahweh’ down, because it’s too awesome. You can control a demon when you know its true name. Though it may rend you skin from bone if you get it wrong. Ghosts have names: say ‘Candyman’ in front of the mirror and he comes. Myths have names: say ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ and he goes away. And if you happen to find out the name of a monster, even one that hides its hideousness inside, well, that might bring you riches untold.

  Monster-hunters can need hiding places too. Sometimes when he prowls the streets Zed is called Jed.

  He had a good day at the football yesterday with Steve; was sad to say goodbye. But blamed it on the beers when he felt a tear in his eye on the way back to Terry’s. He has to tell himself that they were never real mates, that Steve was just a means to an end. Now he’s served his purpose the friendship must disappear, be airbrushed out of existence like the inner lips of 80s porn mags. And still Zed can’t help feeling like he’s lost something.

  Not as much as darling Jack, it seems, when Terry comes back from Sunday lunch, full of drink and worry. Zed has made himself a shoulder to cry on, a voice of concern. His dad, believing he doesn’t know anything of the big picture, has been filling in the small details very nicely. ‘Alcohol preserves everything except secrets,’ is one of his favourite phrases, and as usual the old lush ignores his own advice. The facts come out with the Famous Grouse, and Zed always makes sure the drinks cabinet is well stocked. Invest to earn, that’s the number one rule of economics.

  The earnings should be even higher now the little bastard’s lost his bloater sweetheart, though it’s going to push the show forward a bit. Arranging this show’s been taking up all of Zed’s time; but he’s getting more and more confident it’ll be spectacular. The old man thinks he’s always out at the gym, or looking for work; but he’s been doing work, groundwork, plenty of it.

 
He’s thinking of setting up a detective agency with all the money he’s going to get. Reckons he’ll be good at it, believes he has a flair for the job. He’s enjoyed wriggling himself into people’s lives, the ease with which it can be done. Abusing the ignorant trust that everyone seems to thrust upon strangers. Even people who aren’t who they claim to be, assume that everyone else is. He’s taken pleasure in the watching, the creeping, the following, even the computing, which he roundly despised when it was a routine part of his office work. He eventually broke the codes on his dad’s computer. It was tricky. Alex couldn’t have done it, that’s for sure, despite how the other staff used to bleat on about his abilities.

  Zed had to write a virus-program, in the end, that memorized all of Terry’s user-codes. A variant of the W32/Badtrans-B worm-virus. Badtrans-Z he liked to call it. His invention, his child. His own little worm, working its way through the systems of Terry’s Apple Mac, mailing out all encrypted keystrokes. It wasn’t hard to work out which ones were passwords. One of the passwords was ‘Zebedee’, and for a moment he thought about stopping it all. But it was too late, he’d gone too far, invested too much energy to let that spec of guilt get in the way. On Friday he fixed the computer so that Jack’s panic button wouldn’t work, would always register as a test. Wouldn’t alert his dad, and wouldn’t alert the police. Leaving the ‘special pager’ that Terry was so proud of, as nothing but a useless lump of plastic. Leaving Jack carrying the world’s most expensive paperweight.