chapter TWENTY-FOUR
I hurried as fast as I could along the path, back toward the town center. I was peering into the darkness ahead of me, looking out for danger. I didn’t even notice the figures coming across the wet grass until it was way too late.
“Oi! There’s a lot of people looking for you, including my dad,” a voice called out to the left of me. It was young, female, with the sort of accent you only hear on TV, like a yokel in a sitcom. I stopped in my tracks and turned to face whoever it was.
“And?” Give them a bit of attitude, don’t show them any fear. I could see them now, three kids emerging from the gloom. Kids like me, about my age, jeans and hoodies.
“And I reckon he’ll be earning good overtime. I could hit him up for a few extra quid this week.” The other two laughed. Two more girls, with nose studs and lip rings. They walked up to me, looking me up and down.
Maybe before, I would have started running, or at least hunched my shoulders, stared down, but now I stood my ground, looked right back at them. Their numbers came up, of course. They all had another sixty, seventy years — the piercings a sign of middle-class rebellion, nothing more; these girls were heading for comfortable lives, maybe even a husband and two-point-four children.
“You don’t look like a terrorist,” the first one spoke again. “Did you do it?”
“ ’Course not.”
“What are you runnin’ away from, then?”
“Don’t like the cops. No offense,” I added, thinking of her dad.
“None taken.” She almost smiled. “But you ran away from the bomb.”
“Yeah, just one of those things, you know.”
“Not really. What things?”
I didn’t have the energy to lie. “It just…I just…I felt something bad was going to happen.”
“And it did.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you often feel things, what’s going to happen, like?”
“Yeah, sort of.”
“So you know whether we’re going to turn you in or not?”
I hesitated for a second or two. I wasn’t going to beg.
“I don’t think you are,” I said evenly.
“Why shouldn’t we?”
“You don’t look like a snitch.” It was a compliment, intended to flatter. It worked.
“No, I’m not. You’re right there.” A pause. “You’re not going to last five minutes goin’ up that way, though. Not through the town center. Too many people. Where you goin’, anyway?”
“S’posed to be heading west, Bristol way.” I didn’t want to say Weston — that was our secret, Spider’s and mine.
“On the bus?”
“Walking.”
“Walking! Get out! Are you hungry?”
My eating pattern had been so odd, I didn’t know if I was or wasn’t. When I thought about it, my last real meal had been breakfast, and that seemed like years ago.
“Yeah, a bit.”
“Hang on, I’ve got an idea. Come on, we’ll cut down the back to mine.”
The other two looked at her like she was mad.
“Wait a minute. That’s not such a good idea, is it?” one of them said.
“Shut up — it’s a great idea. Last place they’re going to look.”
“But you’d be in a shed load of trouble if they did….”
“But they won’t. It’ll be cool.” She cut off any further discussion by turning around suddenly and starting to walk back across the grass. “Come on!” she hissed.
I set off after her, with the others following me. I didn’t know whether to trust her or not, but I didn’t really have another option. We walked along quickly, in silence. She led us down back alleys and footpaths, between garden fences and alongside playing fields. Eventually, she stopped, and we all caught up with her.
“I’ll just go in and check what’s goin’ on. Wait here.” And she disappeared ’round a corner. The three of us left behind didn’t have anything to say to each other. They were pretty wary of me, and I was too tired to care.
“It’s OK.” She’d returned. “Dad’s still out and Mum’s glued to the telly. We’ll go in the back way.”
The other two looked at each other.
“Britney, you’re crazy. We’re going home.”
“You’re bailing on me?” They nodded. “Alright, suit yourselves. But listen. Don’t say nothing to nobody. I mean it — nobody.”
“Of course not.”
“See you tomorrow, then.”
“Yeah, see ya.” They trooped off down the street.
“Can you trust them?” I asked.
“’Course. They’re sound. Anyway, they know I’ll kill them if they don’t keep quiet. They wouldn’t dare. Come on.”
We went ’round the side of the house and in through the back door, then straight through the kitchen and upstairs. A little plaque on the bedroom door had a border of roses and the words BRITNEY’S ROOM in the middle. Underneath were more recent additions: a skull and crossbones, a big sign saying KEEP OUT. Inside, the walls were painted dark purple, and there were posters and pictures cut out from magazines all over them — Kurt Cobain, Foo Fighters, Gallows. The bed had loads of pillows on it and a sort of blanket, which was black and fluffy. It was all pretty cool, really. I thought of my last room, at Karen’s, my few bits and pieces all smashed up.
“You can sit on the bed, or the beanbag, whatever.” I perched awkwardly on the edge of the bed. Britney sat next to me.
“So,” said Britney. “I’m Britney and you’re…Jemma?”
“Jem,” I said.
“Right.” Now that she’d got me there, into her room, she didn’t look quite so tough. In fact, she was pretty nervous, making me think the front she’d shown out in the park was just that, a front. Underneath she was as worried as the rest of them. After about a decade of sitting in silence, she found some music to put on and then decided to fix some food, leaving me on my own.
I sat there and looked around. It was a proper girl’s room. As well as all the posters, there was a real dressing table with makeup and jewelry stands on it, and framed photos all over the place: pictures of family and pets. There were a couple of her with a boy, younger than her — in one of them he had thick, curly hair, in the other he was bald, but still with the same big grin on his face. So there was a brother somewhere, was there?
The central heating was stifling after a few days in the open. I was starting to sweat, and I was pretty sure I was smelling rank, too. I took off the green coat, but I was still uncomfortable. I stripped off my hoodie and dropped it on top of the coat on the floor. Lying in a forlorn heap on the rug, they looked disgusting. They were filthy and, looking down, so were my jeans and shoes. Even though Britney’s room wasn’t exactly tidy, I felt really out of place, like a turd on a carpet.
Britney came back into the room, with a big pizza on a plate and a bottle of Coke and a couple of glasses. The smell of the food made me feel hungry and sick at the same time. She held a plate toward me. “Just cheese and tomato, that alright?”
“Yeah, cheers.” I took a slice, not sure if I could actually eat or not. She was tucking in, looking at me and trying not to look at the same time. I nibbled a little bit off the end of the slice, chewed it slowly, and swallowed. It was fine, it settled in my stomach and stayed there, so I ate the rest of the slice and picked up another one. We sat there, eating and drinking. It was bizarre. It was like how you’d imagine teenage kids to be, sitting in someone’s bedroom eating pizza and drinking Coke. But we weren’t just hanging out, talking about boys and makeup. We were sitting there, both aware of the silence, trying to think of something to say.
In the back of my mind, there was still the fear that it could all be a trap. So I asked her, straight-out.
“Why are you doing this? Being nice to me?”
She put her pizza down on the plate. “I’ve never met a celebrity before. Well, not unless you count that one from Skins who switched on the Christmas lights in the town square a couple of years ago, and she was a bitch.”
“A celebrity?” I said. “What do you mean?”
“Well, maybe not a celebrity. Famous, anyway. The whole town’s talking about you. The whole country is. There’s all sorts of rumors about you on the Internet, pictures, too, sightings. Britain’s Most Wanted, that’s what you are.”
“I’m just a kid. I haven’t done anything.”
“Yeah, but they don’t know that, do they? Even if you didn’t do anything, you might have seen stuff. You could be a witness.” She took another bite of pizza. “Did you see anything?”
I thought back to that afternoon. It seemed like a year ago. Before we nicked those cars, before we walked for miles, before we slept out in the woods, before we found that barn…
“You alright? You’ve turned a right funny color.”
I guess the heat and the food and the tiredness had got to me, the room was starting to swim around.
“I feel a bit dizzy.”
Britney jumped up from the bed next to me and took my plate. “Here, lie down. You’ll be alright.”
I lay down, but that was worse. Before I could get up and make a run for the toilet, I was sick, pizza and Coke on her fluffy black cover. She was horrified, and to be honest, so was I. She’d been kinder to me than I had any right to expect, and now I’d wrecked her bedroom. I sat up straight.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” I mumbled. God, no wonder I never got asked anywhere.
“It’s OK. I’ll get something to clean it up.” Britney shot out of the room, while I got up and opened a window to try and let the smell out. I leaned against the window frame, breathing in some cool night air. When Britney reappeared with a bucket and sponge, I took the sponge from her hand, dipped it in the bucket, and started trying to remove the mess from all that fake fur. It was a pretty hopeless job.
“Listen, why don’t you take a shower while I do this? Don’t worry about the noise, Mum’ll just think it’s me.” She showed me where the bathroom was and started the shower running.
“Wait a minute, I’ll get you some clean clothes.” She disappeared and came back with a little heap of clean, folded things, including a big thick towel. “Don’t take too long. Mum’s show ends in ten minutes.”
She disappeared again, and I locked the door behind her. The room was filling with steam. I wiped a hand towel over the mirror above the sink. There was someone in there looking back at me, but I didn’t recognize her. She was nearly bald, big rings under her eyes, looked about twenty, maybe twenty-five, vomit down the front of her shirt. I turned away and stripped off my dirty clothes, then stepped into the shower.
Soft, warm water rained down on me. I breathed in the steam, turned my face up into the flow. I reached blindly for the nearest bottle of shampoo and poured a handful, rubbing foam into my scalp and all over my body. As the lumps of froth slid down my skin and gathered in the bottom of the stall, I could feel myself getting cleaner. I scrubbed under my arms, between my legs, and I suddenly thought, I’m washing him away, and felt sad. For the last twenty-four hours, I’d been carrying the smell of Spider with me, on my skin, inside me. All that was spiraling down into the drain.
I turned off the shower and stepped out, soaking wet. I wrapped the clean towel around me like a dress and then bent and toweled my head dry with the end of it.
There was a gentle tap on the door. “You OK?” Britney hissed.
I slid back the bolt and opened the door a fraction. Our faces were surprisingly close together, and we both jumped back a little. “I’ll be out in a minute,” I whispered. I closed the door and quickly dried off and got dressed. The clothes were great, the sort of thing I’d wear anyway. Bit big, but wearable. I gathered up my old things and the towel and padded along the hallway back into Britney’s room.
She’d done the best job she could of cleaning up, but you could still see where I’d thrown up.
“Sorry,” I said again.
“S’alright. Feeling better?”
“Yeah.”
“I was thinking, the best thing would be for you to get some sleep here and leave when it gets light.”
I looked at her. Was she nuts? Or just keeping me here until her dad got in?
“No, really, I should go.”
“You won’t be able to see anything. Set off early — you can leave a couple of hours before anyone’s up.”
She was right, but I just couldn’t see myself bedding down in a cop’s house for the night.
“Won’t anyone come in here?” I asked.
She smiled. “No, they wouldn’t dare. One: I’ve told them not to. And two: They’re scared what they’d find. Not that they would find anything: no drugs, no condoms, no pills, not even cigarettes. Just me. P’raps that’s what they’re scared of. They don’t really get teenagers, my mum and dad. You could stay, see, you’d be perfectly safe.”
It was almost like she was pleading with me. She didn’t seem to understand that she was the powerful one here. My safety was held by a little silver thread, a cobweb. She wouldn’t have to cut it, just blow and it would stretch and break. She only had to raise her voice and shout to her mum and it was all over for me.
“What about your brother?”
“Oh…no. He died last year.”
Me and my big mouth.
“I’m sorry. I just saw the photos. Sorry.”
“It’s OK. You wouldn’t know, would you?”
Well, I thought, the bald head might have given me a clue.
She was busying herself sorting out blankets and pillows.
“How long is it since you slept in a bed?” she asked.
I had to think hard. “Three nights.” The warmth from the shower, the sheer luxury of being inside had softened me up. I couldn’t face going out into the dark and the cold. Not tonight.
“You sleep there, then. I’ll be alright down here.”
She got down on the beanbag and started to wrap the blanket ’round her.
“Don’t be so soft. It’s your room. I couldn’t.”
“ ’Course you could. You need some sleep. Some proper sleep.”
“No, I couldn’t. It’s not right. I’d rather go than kick you out of your own bed. I mean it.”
“OK, then.” She struggled up and climbed into bed, and I curled up in the beanbag, instantly regretting it. It was bloody uncomfortable.
Britney turned off the lights.
“Night, Britney,” I said.
“Night, Jem.”
Waves of tiredness and nausea were sweeping through me. I was scared of being sick again. The events of the day were filling my head — this morning I’d woken up with Spider’s arms ’round me. It seemed like years ago. It was too much to deal with.
The streetlight filtered through Britney’s thin curtains, and I lay awkwardly, eyes wide open, taking in the room. What would it be like to be this girl? To have a mum and a dad, a cool bedroom, friends to hang out with? And a dead brother. However cozy things seemed, the facts of life were the same. You couldn’t escape death: It would get us all in the end. Which brought me back to Spider. Where was he now? Lying there, I ached just to know he was OK. I ached to be with him.
Somewhere in the room, an alarm clock was ticking steadily away — the noise filled the room, each tick a hammer blow to my head. Three days to go.