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  ‘Oh, really. Where is she?’

  ‘It’s all right. Don’t panic. You’re safe for the moment, she’s gone.’

  ‘Gone?’ says Jack, his teeth grinding with the strain of trying to seem relaxed.

  ‘Yeah, a whole bunch of them have gone to the club already. Steve the mechanic insisted we had one more here first. Bloody pikey’s at the bar, probably just wants to get his round in where it’s cheap.’

  Jack looks over to where Michelle had been, and almost lets out a whoop when he sees that the two men in suits are still stood there.

  One of the bouncers has a scar on his cheek like an action man. But there’s a brutal honesty about it that you don’t see on a plastic doll; this is not some ritualized duelling badge, it reminds Jack of prison faces, it talks about back alleys and broken bottles.

  He doesn’t care. He is exuberant, and fast approaching drunk. Steve the mechanic, as if aware of Chris’s taunts of tightness, bought them a tequila each along with their pints. Jack can still feel a faint burn in his throat, even though it took ten minutes to walk to the club.

  Just for an instant, before they go in, Jack looks up at the night sky and is struck by the unreality of it all. This feels like another world, another lifetime. A cool late summer’s breeze blows him the perfume of a beautiful black girl who’s one place in front. He’s with his friend Chris and his new friend Steve the mechanic. He has drunk tequila, and told people his favourite film; it’s The Blues Brothers. He didn’t know that until tonight. And inside this club, this wide-windowed warehouse, is the girl who maybe, just maybe, he could love. Jack is torn between bitterness, that he has been deprived of all this for so long, and feeling that this moment has made every other moment worth while.

  It doesn’t occur to him that maybe he doesn’t deserve it.

  Jack’s never heard music as loud as this. The base is vibrating his stomach. It’s shaking the floor, making his legs tremble. Or are they trembling anyway? His white shirt is the brightest thing around. It glows in the dark, with an eerie blue luminescence. Chris moves off straight away, twisting and winding, never taking his eyes from the bar. Jack and Steve the mechanic go after him. Following his breadcrumbs deep into the forest.

  When they see Chris again, even he is struggling to get the barman’s attention. Jack has never seen so many women in such a small area. These are not the same girls he has seen out before with Terry. They are not even the same as the girls that he has seen tonight. They are dressed purely for clubbing. What little they wear is designed to magnify, not to conceal. In fact the garments, all laces and lycra, are somehow more suggestive of nakedness than nakedness itself could ever be. They are closer to wrapping paper than clothing. Jack doesn’t know where to look. He is torn between gazing, mesmerized, and trying to look unfazed. Every turn of his head brings into view a new species: of legs, of lips, of breasts, of hips, of eyes, of thighs.

  The girl who was in front of them in the queue alights next to him. Her closeness is painful. She catches his eye, and through the confidence of the beautiful forces him to look away. She laughs, though not unkindly, and turns to talk to her friend, about things of consequence to them.

  There is no sign of Michelle, but the club is filled with corners and crevices. The whole of the dance floor is sunken in the centre, like a rave in the Blue Peter garden. People are dancing everywhere though, not just in the middle, but by the bars and the railings, and even as they move through the crowds. Three girls flick and grind their hips beside a pillar, beguiling Jack, taking him somewhere ancient and instinctive.

  ‘Girls that dance like they’re good in bed never are,’ Chris shouts in Jack’s ear, seeing where he gazes.

  ‘Chris is full of shit,’ Steve the mechanic shouts in his other ear.

  Jack nods, to either or both, and drinks the bottle of beer that Chris handed him. Chris says something to Steve the mechanic and dissolves into the hot crowd, immediately lost in the mingle of short-distance travel.

  ‘Where’s he gone?’ Jack asks.

  ‘He’s gone to get something. It’s a surprise,’ Steve the mechanic tells him.

  Water drips on to Jack’s forehead, condensed sweat from the ceiling. Some of the blokes on the floor have got their shirts off; they’re coated in a sheen that reflects the colliding kaleidoscopes of light. Most of the dancers seem to be doing their own thing. A few around the edges dance in pairs or small groups, but those in the thick appear almost oblivious to people around them. There are no formalities, no rules; no two people are dancing the same way; except for the few who move the least, who look as though they would rather not be dancing at all. Jack knows that he would be one of these: uncertain, wary of humiliation, marking himself because of this.

  Jack has never danced. Not just never in public, never at all. No school discos, no family weddings, no parties, no clubs, no front rooms, no miming in front of the bathroom mirror. Never. Jack is not even sure that he could dance as well as the few foot-lifting marginals. How could he? Where would he begin?

  One cluster fascinates him. They stand half on the steps that lead down to the sunken circle. Their hands and fingers move rapidly, but out of time, too fast even for the DJ’s raging BPMs. When the strobe starts the cluster’s movements stop altogether, or at least it seems that way to Jack. They just appear in position. Like a series of strange still photographs. It is only when one gives a thumbs up that Jack realizes. Not dancing but signing. They are all deaf. A club within the club. Where the conversation-killing music makes their disability an advantage. Jack wonders if they can still feel the base up their spines, like he can.

  Then he spots her: Michelle is down there, dancing with Claire and the small dark-eyed girl and a couple of the lads. He watches her easy movements, she isn’t an amazing dancer, not like the hip grinders, but she is effortless, unencumbered. She has an unpractised grace that makes the tiny girl beside her seem almost ungainly. Maybe feeling his eyes on her, Michelle looks around to meet them; her ponytail wafts down to her shoulder like a feather boa. She smiles at him and waves him down. For a moment Jack sees himself striding down there, strutting – no, slinking – like John Travolta. He sees the crowd parting slightly to let him pass, waiting, anticipating his moves. But Jack has no moves, and the vision sinks away from him. He shakes his head at Michelle, trying to keep up his smile and mouths ‘maybe later’, which he doubts she gets from that distance.

  Michelle keeps dancing, but facing his way. She is wearing a black dress that shows miles of her milk-gum breasts. Jack can feel his pulse in his throat.

  ‘She wants you bad, my friend,’ says Steve the mechanic. Jack had almost forgotten he was there. ‘If you want to go there, then go there. Don’t pay too much attention to Chris. Yeah, he’ll probably rag you for a couple of days, but that’s life: you know what they say about fat girls and mopeds. But that Michelle’s a good lass. Brainy, too, there’s more to her than meets the eye.’

  Chris comes back, face split with a grin like a grapefruit, before Jack can find out what ‘fat girls and mopeds’ is supposed to mean.

  ‘D’you get them?’ Steve the mechanic asks.

  Chris nods. ‘I’m out of beer though. Come on, Dodger, your round.’

  Jack heads off to the bar. This is starting to be a very expensive night. Does it always cost this much to go out? Five or six hours ago he was the richest he’d ever been in his life. Now he seems to have drunk a big chunk of that wad.

  He’s a little unstable on his feet as well; but despite the strangeness of everything, he’s more at ease than he can ever remember being. He’s spent the last seven years in a state of permanent tension, looking for clues as to who’s going to kick off, screening his words for fear of being stained a nonce, watching for where to sit and when to shit and waiting to breathe. Now he feels relaxed. Maybe it’s the drink, but he’s suddenly sure that no one’s going to rumble him. It’s all going to be all right.

  He has a problem finding Chris and Steve th
e mechanic, when he gets back to where they were. But he spots them a wave away, where they’ve secured a high round table. Chris leans on it with accomplished nonchalance.

  ‘Cheers, Dodger,’ he says, relieving Jack of a bottle of Bud. ‘Now open your mouth and close your eyes. I’ve got a present for you.’

  Certainly alcohol is a big player, but there’s more than this, maybe it’s trust in Chris. Maybe Jack’s just used to obeying orders. Whatever the reason, he does what he’s told. He feels a lump on his tongue, which tastes somewhere between salt and sulphur, and when he’s told to swallow it, he takes a swig of Bud and it slips away.

  ‘What was that?’ Jack asks, his bleary mind aware that something peculiar just happened.

  ‘An Elephant,’ says Chris. ‘A White Elephant. They’re supposed to be dead good.’

  ‘An elephant,’ Jack repeats. ‘I don’t understand. What d’you mean, an elephant?’

  ‘A pill, Dodger, that’s what I went to get. We’ve just had ours. I thought Steve had told you.’

  ‘I thought you were going to tell him,’ Steve the mechanic protests. ‘It was your present.’

  It’s evident from Jack’s face that he’s not happy. Chris puts his arm around him: ‘Look, I’m sorry, mate, I should have said something earlier. I mean, I thought you knew. You being the bad boy, I assumed you’d be up for it.’

  Jack doesn’t know what to say. He can’t tell them that he’s on licence for life; that any minor infringement of the law could put him back inside. He can’t say that he’s spent seven years, longer if you count the homes, trying to stay away from drugs. That Terry told him there were people who would use any blemish on his prison record to prove he wasn’t reformed. How could he explain that he’s already dazed beyond belief with novelty, and battered by the alcohol, and that this night had been the best night of his life, but now it’s suddenly not?

  But he doesn’t have to say all this because his eyes tell a tale; and Chris is drunk not stupid.

  ‘Look, it’s cool, Jack, it’s no big deal. We’ll be with you, we’re all in the same boat, and it’ll be wicked. Nothing bad’s going to happen. What could happen? Losing a bit of control never killed anyone.’

  ‘Yeah, no one dies on pills, unless they take like twenty and dance for two days and die of exhaustion,’ Steve the mechanic joins in. ‘Or they drink too much and drown, or not enough and overheat their brains. Or…’

  Jack doesn’t know Steve the mechanic well enough to tell if he’s being very dry or very dense; but Chris says, ‘Steve!’ and raises an eyebrow, which is sufficient to shut him up.

  ‘It’ll be fine, Dodger,’ Chris says. ‘But we’re all getting a bit old for that peer group pressure shit. If you really don’t want to that’s no big deal either – go to the toilet and make yourself sick. Just bring that baby right up.’ Chris laughs. ‘You’re looking a bit worse for wear anyway, a nice chunder’ll probably do you good.’

  The DJ shouts, ‘Scream if you want to go faster!’ like they used to on the waltzers at the fairground. People do scream. There’s a roar from the sunken garden; but Jack realizes that he doesn’t want to go any faster. That everything is moving quite quick enough for the moment.

  ‘I’m sorry, mate,’ he says. ‘I don’t mean to be ungrateful, but I think I am going to go to the toilet.’

  ‘That’s cool,’ says Chris. ‘It’s not a problem.’ And he is clearly doing his best to organize his soused features into an expression of brotherly concern.

  Jack was worried that he wouldn’t be able to make himself sick. As soon as he smells the toilet bowl he realizes these fears were unfounded. Before he can even get his fingers near his mouth a sudden retch brings a beer-based stew gushing into the scarcely cleaner water.

  ‘Someone’s having a good time tonight!’ a stranger’s voice cackles from beyond the cubicle.

  Jack spits to try and remove the swinging strands of mucus from his mouth. They cling like creepers, though, and he has to use the back of his hand to wipe them away, putting a stripe across a shirt cuff at the same time. He peers into the khaki swamp at the bottom of the bowl, hunting for the elephant. He can’t see anything pill-like, but the effort of interrogating the organic matter so closely brings forth another volley of vomit.

  The sinks outside are coated in cups and screwed-up paper towels, but the water tastes flinty and fresh. Jack washes his hands and his face, and tries to clean off his cuff a bit. Beside him a skinny, ginger bloke is filling a plastic bottle with water. He is dripping with sweat, and chews gum with a bottom jaw that chomps sideways like a manic cow. His pupils are huge, like pebbles polished round and smooth, but with a warmth in them that makes a grin shoot across his still swaying mouth when he sees Jack looking at him.

  ‘It’s fucking heaven tonight, innit?’ ginger bloke says, with a real strong southern accent. But before Jack can even start to form an answer, the man is off, already dancing as he passes through the toilet door. Just as it’s about to close, he turns and shouts: ‘Be lucky, mate.’

  F is for Family,

  Fathers, Fidelity.

  It was the twelfth of December, the twelfth month. A was twelve. The electric clock/radio by his bedside table said 12:01. A was waiting for it to read 12:12, he hoped there would be some sense of cosmic rightness when it did.

  At 12:11 there was a knock on the door. It was Terry, A could tell. He hadn’t known Terry long, but there was something calmer, more patient, that separated Terry’s knocks from the rest of the staff. He knocked from genuine politeness, not formality.

  ‘Come in,’ A said, although the lock was on the other side.

  Terry did. ‘It’s your mother,’ he said. ‘There’s no easy way to say this.’ Though he had just used the easiest, because A now knew the rest.

  A’s face froze, as it tried to catch up, as it tried to register the news. Then it crumpled, and while he considered this fresh blow, the tears came.

  He had known for three months his mum was dying, but still it hadn’t steeled him to the shock. Neither had the long periods without seeing her. They had only made him miss her more. So he cried. He cried for her, he cried from guilt, he cried from self-pity and he cried for the loss of his last link to love.

  Terry put his arm around him. Like he meant it. Like he might be a new link.

  The last time A’s mum had visited him in that home she reeked of perfume. As if by application of eau de toilette she could somehow persuade the staff she’d been a good mother. Maybe she was just trying to hide the stink of death. But perfume’s attraction lies in the smell of decaying fruit, and A could see she was disintegrating before his eyes.

  She never wore make-up when she came to see him. It only ended in sad clown streaks. Probably she never wore it at all anymore. She didn’t know anyone in the town she’d been moved to, so why bother? She seemed like she didn’t even know his dad any more. She looked old, and A understood that she was old. Because although she was barely middle-aged, that word supposes another half of life to come; and his mother didn’t have this. She looked as ill as she was. The skin that hung limply from her face was a sallow yellow, the colour of congealed lard on unwashed dishes. When she told him that she had ovarian cancer, A could not dismiss the feeling that he was the seat and cause of this: the original cancer that came from those ovaries.

  A’s father had never visited. The first time that A saw him in eighteen months was at the funeral. He looked smart, that was what struck A first. He had never seen his dad in a suit, even at the trial. He looked too smart, A thought. He looked smarter than he looked sad. And he looked a lot smarter than he looked pleased to see A.

  There were not many mourners. Both A’s parents were only children, and A their only child. All the grandparents were long dead. The whole family was genetically inclined to disappearing. And a lack of relations had helped his parents vanish too.

  The motorcade was one car long. Two if you counted the car his mother was in; stretched out in the back of
a black hearse. Three if you counted the undercover protection squad officers, who followed just in case.

  Protecting who?

  Terry rode with A and his dad, in leather luxury. A cried freely. His father looked out of the window. A wished that Terry would comfort him. But it was his dad’s job, not Terry’s. Even if his dad didn’t want it.

  A had not been into church since the day when it all began, but it brought back no memories. This new-town church was red brick and squat, tacked on to a town hall and leisure centre. The sign outside was solid and bold, freshly painted. Fresher than the decrepit-looking vicar, with his greasy grey curls and pocked cheeks.

  Reverend Long shook the hands of Terry and A’s dad, clearly unsure which was the parent of this boy. He managed to squeeze sympathy into his smile for the adults, but A could see he just wanted the funeral to be over.

  The three fathers followed the coffin-bearers in, and A followed them all. There were a few more people inside the church. Mostly from his mum’s new work, A supposed. New work, new identity, new town, new church, new life. She had a new life now, if you believed in that stuff.

  The choir sang the ‘All Creatures Great and Small’ song. It was like a creature itself, a many-legged, many-backed white beast. Being a school day, it was mostly made up of the retired and the half-witted, over-enthusiastic substitutes. A couldn’t remember his mother ever having been religious; but she had enjoyed repeats of the television series about the vets. He pictured his mum and him curled side by side on the sofa. His dread of a new week at school had always spoiled Sundays, and at the same time made him savour every second. There were no Sundays left now. They were all piled into a wooden box with brass handles.

  A sat between his dad and Terry on the front pew. The vicar climbed the three steps to his oak soap box, and swallowed a burp, before saying: ‘Dearly beloved.’

  This minister, who didn’t know A’s mother, spoke of things about his mother that A didn’t know. Things about her life before he was born, and since he’d been gone. Things that his dad must have told the vicar to say, things that left a space where a child should have fitted.